Record number of early votes cast in Georgia as election gets underway in battleground state

(CNN) — A record number of early votes have been cast in Georgia on Tuesday as residents headed to the polls in a critical battleground state that is grappling with the fallout from Hurricane Helene and controversial election administration changes that have spurred a flurry of lawsuits.

Roughly 252,000 ballots have been cast Tuesday, Gabe Sterling of the Georgia secretary of state’s office said on X. “Spectacular turnout. We are running out of adjectives for this.”

The previous first day record was 136,000 in 2020, Sterling said.

The swing state is one of the most closely watched this election, with former President Donald Trump trying to reclaim it after losing there to President Joe Biden by a small margin four years ago, leading Trump and his allies to unsuccessfully push to overturn his defeat.

Those efforts have loomed large this year as new changes to how the state conducts elections have been approved by Republican members of the State Election Board, leading Democrats and others to mount legal challenges, many of which have yet to be resolved even as Election Day nears.

Despite the massive turnout on Tuesday, the process appeared to go smoother this year for some Atlanta-area voters who spoke with CNN.

“Last time I voted, I voted in the city and the lines were out the door. They only had like, maybe like three people working,” said Corine Canada. “So people honestly just started leaving because it was like that. Yeah, like, ‘This is too long. I can’t sit here (and) wait, I have to go back to work.’ But here, no, it was easy.”

Parts of the state are continuing to recover from Hurricane Helene, which hit the US last month and wreaked havoc on several other states in the Southeast. Georgia election officials say absentee ballots went out by the US Postal Service as scheduled and were not impacted by the storm.

“So far, we have seen just over 250,000 voters request absentee ballots. Perhaps in the next week or so, we’ll see that rise up to 300,000 – and that we think will probably look like around 5-6% of all voters will be voting absentee this cycle,” Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, said on Tuesday.

Experts say that some new state laws that tightened rules for absentee ballots and cracked down on the availability of drop boxes may make the option less appealing than early in-person voting.

While many drop boxes were available 24/7 in 2020, this year there will be fewer of them, and they will be in election offices or early vote locations with hours that tend to mimic normal business hours.

It’s also possible that the state could continue to see high numbers of early votes given that Georgia law now mandates two Saturdays of early voting and allows for two Sundays of early voting if a county desires.

Raffensperger said Tuesday that safeguards are in place for a safe election and that in addition to every race being audited, officials will also randomly audit voting equipment to inspect.

“Pulling out a piece of equipment, a random audit on Election Day, bring it to headquarters and then verify that it is recording the votes accurately, that it has not been hacked by any bad actors out there,” Raffensperger told reporters.

Raffensperger, who was in Trump’s crosshairs following the 2020 election, re-certified the results after a statewide machine recount in December 2020 that confirmed that Biden beat Trump by just 11,779 votes out of nearly 5 million ballots cast in the Peach State.

Legal fights continue

Meanwhile, state judges are scrutinizing a number of new rules passed by the Trump-backed Republican majority on the State Election Board that Democrats warn could inject post-election “chaos” into the Georgia.

During a marathon court hearing Tuesday, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney suggested that a rule requiring ballots case on Election Day be hand-counted by poll workers might have been passed too “late in the game” to remain in effect for this cycle. That rule will be under another state judge’s microscope Wednesday as part of cases brought against it by state and national Democrats and civil rights groups.

McBurney is also still considering a separate rule passed by the board in August that requires local election officials to conduct a “reasonable inquiry” into election results before certifying them – a mandate that Democrats say could give county election officials broad authority to delay or decline altogether their certification of the results “in a hunt for purported election irregularities.”

But McBurney sought to clear up any uncertainty around certification in a ruling this week in which he said that local election officials have “a mandatory fixed obligation to certify election results” in the days following the election – dealing a blow to a GOP election official who had asked him to rule that her duties around certification are “discretionary.”

What voters are saying

In line at an Atlanta-area precinct, two voters who identified as Democrats said they were casting ballots for Harris in an effort to avoid the kind of “chaos” they said surrounds Trump.

“It is essential that we vote today simply because we want to prevent as much chaos as possible because Donald Trump has proved to be the most vicious, uneducated, racist individual that we have encountered,” said Fay Ainsworth.

“Well, we’ve got a crazy person running to be president and a very competent young woman opposing him,” said Joseph Henry King Jr., 77.

Kareem Rosshandler, 32, who identifies as an independent, said he was voting for Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein to send a message to Democrats over their support for Israel in its war with Hamas.

“We’ve been calling for an arms embargo for the last year and they haven’t been responding, and all the protests and the placards won’t matter if we don’t deliver that message where it really counts, which is at the ballots.”

“I mean, the Green Party wants to get rid of the Electoral College,” Rosshandler added. “And that I think is fantastic because right now we have a two-party system, and the only thing worse than that is a one-party system and we’re not that far from that.”

CNN’s Mounira Elsamra contributed to this report.

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