Senate Campaigns Crisscross Georgia As In-Person Early Voting Starts

the Georgia Recorder

By Ross Williams

December 15, 2020

The polls are now open and stakes are high in Georgia’s double U.S. Senate runoffs with the balance of political power for the first two years of the Joe Biden presidency on the line.

Georgia’s early in-person voting began on Monday with twin campaigns between Republican Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue and Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff. Precincts around the state reported some lines but nothing like the technical glitches that caused major delays during the first days of early voting before the November general election.

Alec Poitevint, campaign manager for Sen. David Perdue, told the crowd of over 100 at a Monday rally at Peachtree DeKalb Airport to pester all their friends until they’ve cast their ballots.

“We’ve got to get people to vote early, and what do we mean by vote early? We mean we want you to vote by Christmas,” he said. “Voting is open now, we want you to get there. We know we’ve got some people who can’t go to the polls, it’s OK to vote by absentee ballot, but we want to vote early, we want to get it done by December. The best present, if you’re part of making sure we’re going to win Georgia and save America, is to vote early.”

Republicans cannot afford to be complacent with the balance of power up for grabs, Perdue said.

“Five million people in Georgia voted in November, I’m encouraging everybody to get out again. Normally, in a runoff, you don’t have a presidential race going in this runoff, and normally there’s a drop off. If we have a drop off, we could lose this race,” he said. “We’re not going to have a drop off.”

That rally also featured one of the first tacit admissions from a member of Perdue’s team that President Donald Trump lost the November election. Georgia cast its 16 electoral votes for Biden earlier in the day

“I think it’s a shame in November that people looked past all the accomplishments of the Trump administration and chose to vote against his personality, or maybe the way he communicates rather than all the things he’s done,” said U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue, cousin of David Perdue.

Trump’s loss reshapes the Senate races because if both Democrats win, the party will have control of the White House and both chambers of Congress.

The president has endorsed Perdue and Loeffler, but he has not conceded and continues to spread unfounded conspiracy theories about his loss, leading some to question whether disappointed Trump fans will turn out.

“You would normally go into this kind of runoff thinking Perdue and Loeffler should win, they should have the advantage, but if a lot of Republicans don’t vote because they’re concerned about the process, that could potentially hand the election to the Democrats,” said Kerwin Swint, Kennesaw State University’s Director of the School of Government and International Affairs.

And whichever party comes out the winner, the early vote will likely be decisive.

More than 3.9 million of the record 5 million-plus Georgia ballots cast in the November general election were cast early in person or by mail, and both parties will be keeping an eye on the early vote totals in their high-turnout precincts.

“Spreading out the vote played a factor in the record turnout we experienced because it just gives people that much more opportunity to vote, between the early voting and the mail-in voting and Election Day,” Swint said. “If this runoff operates like most previous runoffs, the turnout won’t be as high, but this runoff may not be normal. We may experience very high turnout here as well.”

Cobb County is one of the northern metro Atlanta counties where shifting demographics paved the way for Biden’s win in the state. It also drew national headlines and criticism after planning to open just five early voting locations for the runoff after it operated 11 ahead of the Nov. 3 election. The county has since added two more locations, though they will only be available during the last week of early voting.

Voters at the Cobb County election headquarters in Marietta waited up to two hours Monday morning to reach the touch screen voting machines, but there were few problems once they got through the socially distanced lines. Other early voting locations across the state reported moving people from precinct entrance to ballot marking machines without much delay. That’s a big improvement over the first days of early voting in the general election, when people reported hours long waits due to a glitch in the state’s new $104 million voting system.

Monday was relatively smooth, but Cobb Elections Director Janine Eveler said she’s planning for big crowds.

“I do not know how to predict,” she said. “The first day is always busy. It may increase and then slow down later, we just don’t know. We’ve added some more check-ins at other locations, this one is limited with just eight check-in locations, and that’s the slowest part because it’s a very short ballot, and it takes longer to check in than to actually vote the ballot.”

The Georgia secretary of state announced Monday the state will audit absentee ballot signatures in Cobb after a complaint the state’s third largest county didn’t properly verify names written on envelopes in the general election. But with the Electoral College count decided in Biden’s favor Monday, a growing number of state and national GOP leaders are urging voters to look ahead to the Jan. 5 U.S. Senate runoffs and leave the presidential contest to the lawyers.

Smyrna ultrasound technician Christina Becker emerged from Cobb’s election headquarters shortly after noon, two hours after her arrival.

“We kind of prepped for a long wait, but I thought it would be a lot quicker just because there’s not as many people on the ballot,” she said.

Becker said the wait didn’t bother her too much, and she was glad to have checked voting off her to-do list.

“This is my only day off, so I came on my day off versus trying to squeeze it in there another time,” she said. “Have you ever voted day of? It’s terrible.”

Marietta research assistant Ernst Fanfan said current events made him decide to vote early.

“Because of the pandemic, that’s one, and then No. 2, I figure if anything is going to happen given all the menacing talk that’s going on online, I figure it’s not going to happen the first day, so that’s the reason I chose to do early voting,” he said. “But when I went in, it was very clean, I like the social distancing that they’re doing as a requirement, I like that you get your own stylus, you use it and then they clean it before they turn it back in. It was a pleasant experience.”

At a joint rally in Atlanta Monday afternoon, the Democratic candidates said they are upbeat about the early voting turnout reported so far.

“People are feeling a real sense of hope right now about what’s possible, and a recognition that these two senate races are so important,” Ossoff said. “The absentee ballot requests that we’ve seen have been extraordinary, we’re seeing great turnout all across the state, so a huge feeling of momentum and energy.”

Warnock agreed.

“If we keep this going, this trend of early voting, then on Jan. 5, we’re all going to be very pleased with the outcome,” he said.

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This story was originally published by the Georgia Recorder. For more stories from the Georgia Recorder, visit GeorgiaRecorder.com.