This story was updated at 7:28 p.m.
Georgia voters broke the record for the number of ballots cast during the first day of early voting.
By 1 p.m. Tuesday, Georgia voters had already broken the previous record of 136,000 ballots cast during the first day of early voting in 2020, according to Georgia Secretary of State’s Office Chief Operating Officer Gabriel Sterling.
In total, Georgia voters cast more than 300,000 ballots on Tuesday, surpassing all records on any given day of early voting in 2022, according to Sterling and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.
Georgians can vote in person at a number of early voting locations in their counties from Tuesday until Nov. 1. Metro Atlanta residents can find a map of all the early voting locations in each county here.
Theresa Renfro voted early at the County Line-Ellenwood Library, a branch of the DeKalb County Public Library. She said she won’t be here on Election Day, so she wants to make sure she has a chance to vote.
“Nervous about the 5th, that something might pop off, so I said I’m coming in and vote early that I know for sure that my vote will count and there’s no disruption,” Renfro said.
Raffensperger said during a Tuesday press conference that early voting started on time in all counties and added that absentee ballots went out on time.
He also noted that a few counties have changed their early voting locations and urged people to check their My Voter Page to make sure they are aware of times and locations.
“We have a great story to tell here in Georgia,” Raffensperger said. “Everything that we have done since 2019 is to improve the process, to build trust and to build your confidence in the election cycle.”
A few ways his office has aimed to do that, he said, was by conducting an audit of voter rolls to make sure only American citizens were registered to vote, outlawing ballot harvesting — when someone else besides the voter returns an absentee ballot — and having a watermarked paper ballot.
Raffensperger also said that Georgia has the “cleanest, most accurate voter list in the entire country” by working with other states and the Department of Driver Services to make sure voters who move out of Georgia are removed from the voter list.
He added that the state will once again conduct parallel monitoring by auditing a random piece of equipment on Election Day to verify that it is working properly and not being hacked. The office will also re-tally every race based on the human-readable text on ballots.
Raffensperger said his office wants to ensure that lines are less than an hour.
“At the end of the day, half of you are going to like these results, and the other half aren’t. But let’s enjoy the process,” he said. “So it’s going to be free, it’s going to be fair and it’s going to be fast, and we think that’s really important.”
According to Blake Evans, the director of elections at the secretary of state’s office, the state has implemented electronic poll books that allow voters to sign in at a polling station, making the average check-in time for a single voter around 57 seconds.
This is a developing story.
WABE’s Rahul Bali contributed reporting to this story.
