Early Voters In Battleground Georgia Already Top More Than Half Of 2020 Turnout

A surge of early voting in Georgia has resulted in the casting of more than half the number of ballots for the 2020 presidential election.

Nearly 2.58 million Peach State residents had voted in person as of Saturday afternoon, according to data posted online by the Secretary of State's Office.

Another 168,031 absentee ballots had been returned and accepted.

Early voting in Georgia — one of seven swing states expected to decide this year's race for the White House — began on Oct. 15 and is scheduled to continue through November 1.

Fewer than 5 million votes were cast in 2020, leading Gabriel Sterling, chief operating officer of the Secretary of State's Office, to tout this year's early turnout when it passed the 50 percent mark from four years ago.

"So for people like Joe Biden & Stacey Abrams, you were wrong saying we had voter suppression here," Sterling, a Republican, wrote Friday night on X. "It's easy to register & vote in Georgia ... and really hard to even try to cheat. Great job by our voters & counties."

Georgia's voter registration records don't include party affiliation so it's unclear whether the early turnout is likely to favor Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris or former President Donald Trump, the GOP candidate.

A Real Clear Politics polling average shows Trump with a 2.2 percent edge over Harris, although the results of nearly every recent survey were within the margin of error.

Earlier this week, Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger said he expected that early and absentee voters would cast 65 percent to 70 percent of all ballots this year and that "maybe even 75 percent of all the vote totals will be reported no later than 8 p.m. on election night."

"What we will be waiting for is the overseas ballots that come in no later than Friday, and so those will then be the final numbers," he told CBS' "Face the Nation" on Sunday. "I understand we're very competitive, and that's why we've done everything since day one to make sure we have fast, accurate and secure elections for all my voters here in Georgia."

In 2020, Trump lost to Joe Biden by just 11,779 votes, leading to an infamous, January 2, 2021, phone call to Raffensberger during which Trump falsely claimed there had been widespread election fraud, including ballot "shredding."

"All I want to do is this: I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have because we won the state," he said.

The call helped lead to the indictment of Trump and 18 others in an alleged scheme to illegally overturn the election results.

That case is on hold pending oral arguments scheduled for December 5 before the Georgia Court of Appeals over a defense effort to disqualify Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis.

Four defendants in the case struck plea deals with prosecutors, but Trump and the others have all pleaded not guilty.