Thread by @gtryan

Hey everybody, did you hear about early voting in Georgia yesterday? Apparently it happened and people had takes.

I'll try to cut through some of the noise and bring you the good stuff.

#gapol #gapolitics

georgiavotes.com

First, we had 127,871 people show up in-person and successfully cast a vote yesterday. This is up 41% from 2016's first day total of 90,764.

On top of that, we recorded an additional 34,358 mail-in ballots yesterday for a grand total of 162,229 votes cast.

You've probably seen this called record turnout and for the first day of in-person voting it is!

But we've seen a number of days with more turnout than this. The largest day ever of in-person voting was the final day of 2016, which saw 253,030 people vote.

Looking at 2016 and 2018, we had 10 days with higher daily totals for in-person voting:

253,030 - 11/4/16
233,294 - 11/2/18
198,821 - 11/3/16
186,815 - 11/2/16
180,988 - 11/1/16
176,775 - 10/31/16
158,332 - 11/1/18
152,692 - 10/30/18
146,111 - 10/31/18
145,926 - 10/29/18

If you think Monday was big, wait till week 3.

Yesterday's numbers were also skewed by the fact that 35 counties did not open early voting locations due to the holiday. The only major county (100k+ voters) was Houston, but this group did account for 7,276 votes on Day 1, 2016.

So, 41% growth with 22% of counties, representing 8% of Day 1 early votes in 2016 not open for voting. Now we're getting a little clearer picture.

But where did these voters come from?

No surprise the big-four counties made up the biggest share of overall turnout. Fulton, Dekalb, Cobb and Gwinnett were 37.4% of all votes yesterday. These counties also account for 34.1% of all registered voters, so that makes sense.

It's easier to show top counties with screenshots, so here are the top-10 by vote totals, and top-10 by percent increase (minimum 200 votes yesterday). If you wondered why Gwinnett has lines, here you go. They had a 450% increase in voters.

Quick shoutout to Dekalb County who more than doubled their volume from last year and did it without the same kind of major line issues we saw in Cobb and Gwinnett.

And based on a question from @BeeForGeorgia I also took a quick peak at the in-person voters and what method they used to vote in the 2020 Primary. Here are those numbers:

26,325 voted early in-person
30,735 voted by mail
24,511 voted day of
46,100 didn’t vote in the primary

That's a lot of info, there's more good stuff on georgiavote.com. Go check it out, and let me know if you have any questions!