‘Really the big dumps’ of ballots ’will come early as opposed to late,’ says the official.
A top election official in Georgia’s Secretary of State’s office said the voting results will be mostly complete by 8 p.m. ET during the Nov. 5 contest.
Georgia Deputy Elections Director Michael Barnes said in an on-camera interview Monday that “come eight o’clock tomorrow night, we may have a very good picture of what the results might be.”
Under state law, counties across Georgia—a state that is expected to play a pivotal role in the presidential election—have to report their early and mail-in voting numbers to the Secretary of State’s office by 8 p.m.
“Really the big dumps“ of ballots ”will come early as opposed to late. At least that’s our anticipation,” Barnes said, adding that counties have already processed early voting before Election Day.
That’s a marked difference from the 2020 election, when ballots were dumped and counted late in the night and overnight on that Election Day, sparking allegations of fraud and irregularities. Numerous lawsuits were filed in the Peach State in the aftermath of that election, focusing on how it was administered.
In Georgia and other states, that year saw a significant amount of mail-in ballot returns due to the COVID-19 pandemic and related lockdown measures.
But for 2024, Georgia has reported more early in-person voting numbers. As of Election Day, some 4 million people have either voted early or by mail, accounting for 55.3 percent of registered voters, the office said over the past weekend.
Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said this year was the most successful early voting period “in Georgia history.”
“Four years of progress brought us here. We’re battle-tested and ready, regardless of what the critics say. And we’re going to hold those who interfere in our elections accountable,” he said in a statement.
Georgians cast 3,761,968 ballots during the early voting phase, and they case 242,620 mail-in ballots, the secretary’s office said in a statement. In 2020, about 2.6 million voted during the early in-person period, while over 1.3 million cast votes by mail, according to data from the University of Florida.
Barnes said that in 2020, the counting was much slower.
“We had such a large amount of mail-in absentees that had to be processed. And that’s what lingered into the late overnight hours,” Barnes said.
In September the Georgia State Election Board passed a rule that mandated poll workers do carry out a hand-count of paper ballots at poll sites across the state. However, a state judge blocked that rule last month.
Unlike Georgia, the two battleground states of Pennsylvania and Wisconsin are expected to take longer due to state laws around counting ballots.
In Pennsylvania, the release of mail-in voting results cannot start until after polls have closed at 8 p.m. ET on Election Day. Earlier this week, Wisconsin election official said in a news conference that the Badger State’s results could be expected in the early hours after Election Day.
“I just want to assure the American public that it will happen, but it will be sometime after midnight,” Paulina Gutierrez, executive director of the Milwaukee Election Commission, said on Monday in a news conference. “Even if we were to finish counting at a reasonable time, we have a very formal exporting, transportation, and uploading process to ensure the safety and security of those results.”