On Tuesday, Georgia shattered early voting records with more than 300,000 ballots cast on the first day of voting.
By Friday morning, more than 1 million had already cast their ballots.
“We have done it! We crossed the 1,000,000 voter mark at around 11:50am,” Gabriel Sterling, the chief operating officer for the Georgia secretary of state’s office, said on social media. “Amazing turnout! So happy for the counties and the voters! Let's keep it going.
That figure represents more than 14% turnout of the state’s nearly 7.2 million active voters, and accounts for a fifth of the nearly 5 million ballots cast in the 2020 presidential election.
One of those ballots belongs to former President Jimmy Carter, who cast his vote this week at age 100. The longest-living president cast his ballot in the key swing state of Georgia, the Carter Center said on Wednesday. His family has said for months that the 39th president, who has been in home hospice care for more than a year and a half, was looking forward to voting for Vice President Kamala Harris.
The elder Carter’s absentee ballot was filled out and put in a drop box near Plains, Ga., his hometown, his family told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The peanut farmer-turned-politician served as Georgia’s governor from 1971 to 1975 and won the 1976 presidential election, serving one term before losing to Ronald Reagan in 1980.
Georgia is a key battleground in the presidential race, after Biden edged out Trump by around 11,000 votes in 2020 and secured the state for a Democratic ticket for only the second time since Carter left office.
Public polling suggests the race is close, with polling averages from the New York Times and FiveThirtyEight giving Trump a roughly one percentage point advantage.
The state is also site to heated court battles over how ballots can be cast — judges this week blocked a rule that mandated ballots be counted by hand after polls close, required that county officials certify election results, and invalidated several election rules passed by the Trump-backed State Election Board — and the long-delayed criminal racketeering prosecution of Trump and more than a dozen of his allies for their efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss in Georgia.
Trump rallied in Georgia this week, telling a crowd in Atlanta that Black and Latino Americans who support Harris instead of him need to have their “head examined,” and took part in a Fox News town hall focused on women’s issues.
Harris deployed key surrogates to Georgia in recent days, including former President Bill Clinton, and is set to return to the state herself on Saturday to campaign in Atlanta with R&B superstar Usher. She’s also set to campaign with former President Barack Obama in the state next week.
Spectrum News' Joseph Konig contributed to this report.
