Georgia opened up early voting for the midterms this week, and Republican election officials in the state have been touting record-breaking turnout to support their claim that voting is and will remain seamless.
On Tuesday, Gabe Sterling, a high-ranking GOP official in the secretary of state’s office, tweeted that more than 130,000 people cast ballots on the first day of early voting, nearly matching the first-day count from 2020 and setting a midterms record by surpassing the first-day votes in 2018 by more than 60,000 people.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who has claimed that Georgia’s voter suppression laws don’t actually suppress the vote, attempted to spike the football as well.
“We’re extremely pleased that so many Georgians are able to cast their votes, in record numbers and without any reports of substantial delays,” he said in a news release. “This is a testament to the hard work of Georgia’s election workers, the professionals who keep our elections convenient and secure.”
On one hand, that sounds great and perhaps it is.
On the other hand, Raffensperger, who’s running for re-election, has made similar claims about Georgia’s elections in the past to undermine legitimate allegations of voter suppression that have been highlighted by Stacey Abrams, the Democratic nominee for Georgia governor. To do this, he has conflated Abrams’ claims with former President Donald Trump’s effort to overturn Georgia’s results in the 2020 presidential election.
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Gov. Brian Kemp, who as secretary of state oversaw his own race for governor against Abrams in 2018 and whose office put thousands of Georgia voter registrations on hold before that race, has also claimed high turnout is an indicator that voter suppression is a nonissue.
Their goal seems obvious: to quell talk about voter suppression and legitimize an election process that seems rigged in conservatives’ favor.
To be clear, there are promising signs about Georgia’s voter turnout numbers, but not enough to tell us much about voter access with any certainty. And we definitely don’t know enough to support any wild claims that the state’s new election law has helped secure elections. In fact, we have every reason to believe it will negatively affect turnout.
But there are a couple of things we do know.
Along with the aggregate numbers released by the state, experts tracking early voting in Georgia have assessed that as of Thursday morning, roughly 53% of the early votes have come from Democrats. That’s compared with about 40% for Republicans.
Raffensperger is playing number games by suggesting that the high turnout implies voting has been made “convenient” for everyone, because there’s no basis for that claim.
For one: The sheer number of early voters doesn’t automatically suggest democracy is in full bloom.
According to the most recent census data available, Georgia saw its population increase by nearly 90,000 people from July 2020 to July 2021. With that, you would expect more people to vote than in the 2018 midterms.
And data from Georgia’s primary races is already undercutting GOP claims that high voter turnout means voter suppression is imagined. A study released by the Brennan Center in August showed that despite a spike in voter turnout for Georgia’s primary races earlier this year, there was a significant gap in white and Black voter participation. That could indicate Georgia’s restrictive voting law is effectively suppressing the Black vote.
Again, this isn’t to say the early numbers we’re getting out of Georgia aren’t a good sign. It’s just too soon for Raffensperger, Sterling or Kemp to say for sure.
In short: Don’t take anything for granted these next couple of weeks. Get out and vote like your life depends on it. In many ways, it might.