Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger Monday announced Georgia as the second-best state in the nation for early voting following a recent study by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.
The Election Administration and Voting Survey 2022: Comprehensive Report ranked Georgia second in the nation, with 58% of Georgians casting their ballots in person prior to the official election day. As a comparison, only 48% of Georgians cast their ballots early at the box in 2018.
“Georgia leads the nation in voter access, election security, and innovation,” Raffensperger said. “Georgia voters have the confidence that they can cast their ballot easily and that their vote will count.”
The Peach State recorded 2,290,459 in-person ballots cast before election day in 2022. The only state that beat out Georgia for in-person early voter turnout was Texas, which boasted just over a 63% early voter in-person turnout rate.
Georgia had a reported total registered voter count of 6,955,386. Of the total registered voters, 3,963,152 actually cast their ballots either before or on election day.
58% of Georgia voters reportedly participated in the three weeks of early voting in 2022, with just over one-third of the state’s voters hitting the polls on election day. Only 6% of state voters returned their ballots by mail, according to the comprehensive report.
The U.S. Census Bureau in May named Georgia as the Southeast’s leader in voter turnout, as Georgia saw its highest voter registration count in 20 years for a congressional election.
Georgia received 3,232,104 registration applications for the 2022 election.
Additional studies by MIT’s Election Data and Science Lab, along with the School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Georgia found 98.9% of Georgia voters had “no issue casting a ballot.” What’s more, 89.7% of the state’s voters reported feeling confident about the election process.
Those statistics were produced through surveys polling 1,253 registered voters in Georgia who voted in the 2022 midterm election.
Georgia has previously been named as the top state for election integrity and number one in voter access by groups on both sides of the political spectrum, according to the Secretary of State Press Office.
The Peach State was the first state in the nation to implement a combination of automatic voter registration, 17 days of early voting and no-excuse absentee voting. The press office reports the state is seeing the “largest increase in average turnout of any other state in the 2018 midterm election and record turnout in 2020 and 2022.”
In-person voter turnout in the 2022 midterm election was reportedly the largest in Georgia midterm history.
