ATLANTA — Nearly 750,000 Georgians cast votes during the first three days of early voting in the presidential election.
Channel 2’s Richard Elliot spoke exclusively with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger about the numbers so far.
“We are just excited about the early voting turnout. We had over 300,000 people showing up on Day 1,” Raffensperger told Elliot.
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Elliot also visited a polling location in Cobb County on Thursday. There were some lines but not long waits usually between 15-30 minutes but many places less than that.
Nothing was going to keep Wanda Dallas away from the polls at the election office on Roswell Street in Marietta on Thursday.
“I’m going to exercise my right,” Dallas said.
The election office has seen huge numbers so far in the first three days of early voting. Elliott spoke with Cobb County Elections Director Tate Fall about the strong turnout.
“We did just over 21,000 voters. Yesterday,” Fall said. “We did over 20,000 and then altogether including this morning, we’ve done about 48,000. so it’s been very steady, but our lines have stayed down which is awesome.”
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Fall says they knew this was going to be a big presidential election. They prepared for it, but just how big the turnout has been so far surprised even her.
“So we really didn’t know what to expect. We thought it was going to be a high turnout. I didn’t think we thought it would be this high turnout,” Fall said. “We’re seeing double what we did in 2020 and 2022.”
Vic Carroll was one of those coming out to vote early.
“It was quick and easy. They had it really organized, took maybe 30 minutes, and everybody was in a good mood,” Carroll said.
Raffensperger said seeing the high early voter turnout numbers shows him that Georgians are trusting the system.
“When you see that kind of [numbers], people show what they think when they show up to vote,” he said. “And they’re out there voting.”
The secretary of state added that his office paid particular attention to making sure early voting sites were ready to go in areas of Georgia hit hard by Hurricane Helene. He reports so far, early voting is going well there.
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