Actually the headline may be a little misleading since more than 700,000 of Georgia’s electorate have already cast their votes during one of the most rigorous and busiest early voting campaigns in recent history.
Secretary of State Brian Kemp, Republican, said the early ballot casting includes more than 630,000 in person and nearly 80,000 received by mail with the heaviest turnouts in the state’s largest counties, which are not coincidentally centered in around Atlanta:
- Fulton 70,511,
- DeKalb 59,886,
- Cobb 50,578,
- Gwinnett 40,562,
- Henry 23,556.
For the first time ever in Georgia, some polls were opened on Saturday and Sunday for early voting, including the successful “Souls to the Polls” campaign engineered by the likes of historic Ebenezer Baptist Church and Friends of Clayton County, which straddles the southern edge of Atlanta and encompasses the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport.
From a political and social standpoint, Georgia remains fire-engine red, but Democrats believes the state is going to turn shades of pink. The Democratic Party’s strategy for the midterm elections is to woo those voters outside of the urban areas who were once their constituents. And according to one Atlanta elected official, they are also targeting voters in the cities who have not voted or have voted only once since Obama was first elected.
One problem with the voting is that a state judge declined Tuesday to act in a dispute over 56,000 voter registration applications that have reportedly gone missing.
Despite the vociferous protestations from the NAACP and voter advocacy groups, who accused elections officials of deliberately not processing applications quickly enough — a situation they say could lead to citizens not having their votes counted on Nov. 4 — which could impact the outcome of the hotly contested races for senator and governor, the judge refused to act. This pleased Georgia Secretary of State, who called the lawsuit “frivolous.”