Early voting reaches such heights that some Georgia polls may be Election Day 'ghost town'

STONE MOUNTAIN, Ga. (AP) — Flags telling people to “Vote Here” fluttered in not only English, but Spanish, Korean, Vietnamese and Chinese at the Mountain Park Activity Building as a steady stream passed through its doors to cast their ballots in the 2024 election.

One by one, the voters who turned out Thursday were adding to what's become a colossal heap of early ballots in the key swing state of Georgia. Early voting, scheduled to end Friday, has been so robust that nearly 4 million ballots could be cast before Election Day dawns on Tuesday.

“I normally try to vote early because I’m a mailman and it’s hard to me to get over here on an election day,” said Mike King of Lilburn, who voted for Trump Thursday before scattering leaves as he departed in his red pickup truck.

Voters like King are part of the reason early vote records have been shattered not only in Georgia and other presidential battlegrounds such as North Carolina but even in states without major contests on the ballot like New Jersey and Louisiana. During the pandemic in 2020, then-President Donald Trump railed against early voting and mail voting, claiming they were part of a plot to steal the election from him. In 2022, after falsely blaming his 2020 loss on early voting, he kept at it.

In both elections, Republicans largely stayed away from voting early, preferring to do it on Election Day. This year Trump has emphasized early voting and his supporters are responding. So far Republicans have flooded the polls in places where in-person early voting is available. Though they've increased their mail voting too, it's been at a much lower rate.

“The Trump effect is real,” said Jason Snead, executive director of Honest Elections, a conservative group that focuses on election policy.

So far about 64 million people have cast ballots in the 2024 election, which is more than one-third the total number who voted in 2020. Not all states register voters by party, but in those that do the early electorate is slightly more Republican than Democratic, according to AP Elections Data.

Early vote data, of course, does not tell you who will win an election. It doesn't tell you who the voters support, only basic demographic information and sometimes party affiliation. One demographic may seem unusually energized because it dominates the early vote, only to have no more voters left to turn out on Election Day.

Campaigns encourage early voting because it lets them “bank” their most reliable supporters, freeing resources to turn out lower-propensity backers on Election Day.

“I've largely viewed the idea of going back to Election Day as trying to put toothpaste back in a tube,” Snead said.

Election officials say the early vote is already racking up impressive totals. In North Carolina, all but two of 25 western counties most harmed by Hurricane Helene in late September are posting higher early in-person turnout percentages compared with 2020.

Statewide, over 3.7 million people had cast early in-person ballots as of early Friday, exceeding the early in-person total for all of 2020, the North Carolina State Board of Elections said. Early in-person voting ends Saturday afternoon in the state.

“Hurricane Helene did not stop us from voting,” said Karen Brinson Bell, the state board’s executive director and top voting official in that swing state. She added that voters have been appreciative and "we are seeing a lot of civility.”

In Georgia, so many people have voted early that a state election official says it could be a “ghost town” at the polls on Election Day.

There's no doubt that part of that is due to Trump. Large signs at his rallies spell out “VOTE EARLY!” and others have also been pushing Republicans to cast ballots before Tuesday, even by mail.

“This election is too important to wait!” proclaimed one flyer mailed to a voter in Georgia by the Elon Musk-funded America PAC. “President Trump is counting on patriots like you to apply for an absentee ballot and bank your vote today.”

Tona Barnes is one person who has heeded that message. Instead of voting on Election Day, she voted early for the first time on Thursday in the northern Atlanta suburb of Marietta.

“He keeps putting it out there to vote early,” she said of Trump.

Others in Georgia, both Democrats and Republicans, say they vote early for convenience.

Ashenafi Arega, who voted Thursday for Vice President Kamala Harris at the Mountain Park Activity Building in suburban Gwinnett County, said he cast a ballot early “to save time.”

“I think on Election Day the line will be long,” said Arega, who owns an importing business. “It will be discouraging.”

Gabe Sterling, chief operating officer for Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, said Wednesday that the state already had hit two-thirds of the entire turnout for the 2020 election, when Georgia set a record number of nearly 5 million votes cast.

“There’s a possibility it could be a ghost town on Election Day," Sterling said. "We had less than a million show up during COVID in 2020 with all the uses of pre-Election Day voting.”

Nearly as many people had voted early by this time in 2020 in Georgia, but the turnout pattern was different. For a brief time during the pandemic, Georgia allowed voters to request mail ballots online without sending in a form with a hand-inked signature, and allowed counties to set up many drive-through drop boxes. But fueled by Trump's insistence that he had been cheated, Republican lawmakers allowed only sharply limited drop boxes going forward, imposed new deadlines on mail ballot requests and went back to requiring a hand-signed absentee request form.

That law and others in Georgia led to cries that Republicans were trying to suppress votes. Republicans said 2024's robust early turnout proves that isn't so.

“I think that gives the lie to this idea that having some pretty basic security measures in place somehow discourages people from voting,” said Josh McKoon, chairman of the Georgia Republican Party.

But Tolulope Kevin Olasanoye, executive director of the Democratic Party of Georgia, discounts those statements, saying recent fights about State Election Board rules, which ended with a judge throwing out the rules, prove Republicans are preparing to decry the legitimacy of any vote they don't win in Georgia.

“I think there is no doubt that these folks were trying to muck up the waters a little bit to have something to point to potentially down the road,” Olasanoye said.

Republicans are thrilled with the turnout in heavily GOP counties, which in some cases is approaching two-thirds of active voters. Through Thursday, about 39% of voters in the majority Black Democratic stronghold of Augusta-Richmond County had cast ballots, while nearly 54% of voters in the neighboring Republican suburb of Columbia County had voted.

“Just from a winning and losing standpoint, the more votes I have put in the bank by Friday, the fewer votes I have to push to the polls on Tuesday to win,” McKoon said.

Olasanoye, though, expressed confidence that Harris was broadening her coalition and would still win.

“Democrats and the vice president, we’re just doing all right,” he said.

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Associated Press reporters Gary Robertson and Makiya Seminera contributed from Raleigh, North Carolina.