Georgia’s early voting first-day turnout already breaks record

Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said Georgia voters should have a plan for casting ballots at the polls as early voting kicked off at a record pace on the first day. (file photo)

This story was updated at 9 p.m. on Tuesday, Oct. 15, 2024.

The first day of early voting Tuesday has already set a new record for the first day of advanced voting, according to Georgia Secretary of State officials.

By the end of the day, 305,900 votes had been cast in person, according to the Georgia Secretary of State’s datahub .

The first day early voting record is 136,000 votes cast in 2020.

Georgia, which is seen as one of the seven swing states, has three weeks of early voting.

Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger recommended that Georgians plan ahead for how they intend to vote in the upcoming election.

“If you want to vote absentee, make that decision today and get your request in,” he said during a Tuesday briefing on the start of early voting. “If you are going to vote early, take a look at your calendar and decide when you are going to vote early, and if you are going to vote on Election Day, decide what time.”

Raffensperger said his office’s goal at early voting sites and at the 2,400 polling places on Election Day is to have voters spend as little time as possible filling out their ballots. It took the average voter only a few minutes to cast a ballot on Tuesday morning.

“We want to make sure that they’re less than an hour. We loved when we had in 2022 the average wait time was less than three minutes and got down as low as two minutes at times,” Raffensperger said. “This morning, there appeared to be no slowdowns and lines have been moving everyone in less (time) than that.”

Georgia Recorder Deputy Editor Jill Nolin contributed to this report.

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