Early voting in the presidential elections began on Tuesday in the US state of Georgia. Officials said that a record had already been set for the number of votes recorded on the first day after the opening of the polls.
Gabriel Sterling from the Georgia Secretary of State's office reported on X that on Tuesday, the first day of early voting in the state, a record 328,000 ballots had already been cast. votes. The previous record was set in 2020 and amounted to 136,000. votes cast on the first day of early voting.
Georgia elections
Georgia is one of seven swing states, so the voting results there may be crucial to the final election result. The number of electoral votes possible is 16.
Four years ago, nearly 5 million residents voted in Georgia, and Joe Biden won the most support there, although with a slight advantage. He was the first Democrat since 1992 to do so.
– It is important that we vote today because we simply want to prevent chaos. “Donald Trump has proven to be the most malicious, incompetent, racist person we have ever faced,” Georgia voter Fay Ainsworth told CNN. Another voter, Kareem Rosshandler, said he voted for the Green Party candidate to “give a signal to the Democrats for their support for Israel in the war against Hamas.” In turn, another voter said in an interview with the BBC that he was voting for Donald Trump because “it seems like he will do everything he said he would do.”
Early voting in the USA
Early voting in the presidential election – possible both in person at polling stations and by mail – is becoming more and more popular in the US. According to data from scientists from the University of Florida, in 2020 one in seven voters cast their vote before the official election date. In recent weeks, both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump have encouraged their supporters to cast their ballots early. Be the first on September 20 Residents of Virginia, Minnesota and South Dakota went to the polls.
Early voting and postal voting – although they have long been an element of the US electoral process – were associated with huge controversy in 2020 due to the accusations of Donald Trump, who baselessly suggested that they were mechanisms allowing for electoral fraud.
Georgia's Republican-controlled elections board recently voted to require a manual recount of millions of ballots, which experts say could cause delays and errors. On Tuesday, the court temporarily suspended the requirement, saying it created uncertainty just weeks before the election.
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CNN, Reuters, New York Times, BBC
Main photo source: PAP/EPA/ERIK S. LESSER