With slightly more than 1 week to go, 33% of active voters in Worth County have already cast ballots. This is a significant surge from past years and is part of the record early turnout that Georgia has seen so far ahead of the November elections.
“The record turnout is a testament to the hard work our state and local elections officials are putting in to uphold election access for Georgia voters,” said Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. “We are setting records every hour. Adjusting to a new voting system or turning on a dime to accommodate a surge in absentee by mail voting would be enough to challenge even the most seasoned elections officials. Doing so with the added complications of COVID-19 has made this effort truly Herculean.”
So far, 7,425 of Worth County’s 22,468 registered voters have already turned out to vote early, representing 33% of the total registered votes in the county. This significant early turnout number tracks with the record turnout seen across Georgia and throughout the country.
Of the 7,425 ballots cast in Worth County so far, 2,124 absentee by mail ballots have been returned by mail or through the more than 200 absentee ballot dropboxes that have been installed across the state. The drop boxes were first allowed following a rule passed by the State Election Board, which is chaired by Secretary Raffensperger, earlier this year at the request of county elections officials.
Much of the surge in early voting has come from record early, in-person voting. In Worth County so far, 5,301 voters have cast ballots early, in-person.
Georgia is recognized as a national leader in elections. It was the first state in the country to implement the trifecta of automatic voter registration, at least 16 days of early voting (which has been called the “gold standard”), and no-excuse absentee voting. Georgia continues to set records for voter turnout and election participation, seeing the largest increase in average turnout of any other state in the 2018 midterm election and record primary turnout in 2020, with over 1.1 million absentee by mail voters and over 1.2 million in-person voters utilizing Georgia’s new, secure, paper ballot voting system.