GeorgiaVotes.com creator says site's popularity at all-time high

November 1st, 2022

Ryan Anderson, standing, created the website GeorgiaVotes.com to analyze and track early voting trends across the state.

Courtesy / Ryan Anderson

Ryan Anderson started GeorgiaVotes.com as a hobby and side project in 2018 when people were paying a lot of attention to Georgia’s gubernatorial race and voter rolls.

The site uses publicly available data from the secretary of state’s office to compare voting records with geographic and demographic data to help identify trends in voting patterns.

Anderson joined WABE’s Jim Burress to talk about what the numbers can tell us.

Many Georgia voters who voted by mail in 2020 are choosing to show up in person to vote, and Anderson said Georgia’s Republican-backed 2021 voting may have contributed to this.

“I would say it maybe hasn’t had an effect on the total number, but it certainly would have had an effect on how people are choosing to or being able to cast their ballots,” said Anderson.

According to Anderson, the breakdown of voters by race and age can tell a lot about which way certain races may be leaning. So far, a large percentage of Black voters and older voters have turned out to vote early, with many Black voters tending to lean Democrat, while many older voters traditionally lean Republican.

Anderson said the site’s popularity picked up during the 2020 election when Georgia elections were at the center of national news, and now four thousand to five thousand visitors view the site each day.