The highest number of early votes have been submitted in Fulton County.
More than 1 million people have voted in the battleground state of Georgia in the first four days of early voting, according to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office.
“We have done it! We crossed the 1,000,000 voter mark at around 11:50am. Amazing turnout! So happy for the counties and the voters! Let’s keep it going,” Gabriel Sterling, the agency’s chief operating officer, said in an Oct. 18 post on social media.
Several days prior, Sterling said that the pace of early voting in Georgia was breaking records and on Thursday stated that “massive” voter turnout put the state on pace to surpass the 1 million early votes cast mark on Friday.
Georgia’s election data hub, a resource provided by the Secretary of State’s office, showed that 1,194,439 early ballots had been accepted as of Friday evening.
The highest number (136,744) of early votes have been submitted in Fulton County, which in the 2020 election became the focus of multiple recounts following former President Donald Trump’s claims of voter fraud.
Trump’s allegations were partly based on video showing Fulton County election workers continuing to count ballots late into the night after observers were told to leave. State election officials, including Raffensperger, said that the workers were following normal procedures and no fraud occurred.
Fulton County was included in a broader hand recount of all ballots in Georgia that took place after the 2020 presidential election, later followed by a machine recount at the request of the Trump campaign, which confirmed the accuracy of the initial results.
Georgia’s record-breaking early voter turnout could be driven by several factors, including the legacy of the contested 2020 election and a strong emphasis on voter turnout by both parties in the current election cycle.
The Republican National Committee (RNC) launched a “Bank Your Vote” campaign in 2023 under prior leadership that was meant to maximize pre-Election Day voting. This has largely continued under the leadership of Michael Whatley, who took over from Ronna McDaniel as the RNC chair in March 2024.
Meanwhile, the University of Florida’s Election Lab showed that the total number of early votes cast across 37 reporting states had broken through the 11 million mark as of around 3 p.m. ET on Oct. 18. The breakdown was around 3.1 million in-person early votes and roughly 7.9 million mail-in ballots returned.
A total of nearly 56 million mail-in ballots have been requested in the current election cycle, per the Election Lab, whose data also showed that registered Democrats were outpacing Republicans by a factor of around 1.6 in terms of both mail-in ballots requested and submitted.
The latest polling average from RealClearPolitics shows that Trump, the Republican nominee, and Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic candidate, are running neck-and-neck in the Peach State.
An average of 11 polls taken between Sept. 23 and Oct. 16 shows Trump in the lead by 1.1 points with 48.7 percent to Harris’ 47.6 percent in Georgia, considered a key battleground state in the 2024 presidential race.
In 2020, Georgia election officials certified the race in favor of President Joe Biden over Trump by an 11,779-vote margin, a far smaller difference than in Trump’s 2016 victory against Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, who lost the state by 211,141 votes.
Georgia is also currently the focus of an election-related legal battle.
Republicans on Oct. 17 appealed a Georgia judge’s ruling from earlier this week, which declared seven election rules recently passed by Georgia’s State Election Board to be unconstitutional. Fulton County Superior Court Judge Thomas Cox voided rules that included mandating that ballots be hand-counted by precinct after polls close and another that would have required local election officials to verify the accuracy of the results before the election is certified.