Georgia is seeing early voter turnout at a higher rate than ever before among voters in minority communities, reported National Review. According to data from the Georgia Secretary of State’s office, triple the amount of Black voters have casted their early votes this year in comparison to the primaries in 2018.
President Biden recently condemned an elections bill signed into Georgia law, calling it “Jim Crow in the 21st century,” CNN previously reported. As one can expect, the new law put more voting restrictions which disproportionately target Black and brown voters including new identification requirements and limited use of ballot drop boxes. However, that seemed to only encourage Black Georgia voters to get ahead.
Per National Review’s report, Black voters now make up nearly three percent more than the total electorate in comparison to 2020.
More from National Review:
Georgia does not register voters by party, but the Georgia Secretary of State’s office knows which party primary these voters are casting ballots in, and the numbers so far show minority voters are growing more interested in the GOP primary. Five times as many Hispanic voters are casting Republican ballots in this year’s primary as they did in 2018, five times as many Asian voters are casting Republican ballots in 2022 as there were in 2018, and four times as many Black voters are casting GOP ballots this year.
It is possible that this early vote turnout is just taking a bite out of the election day vote, and that turnout in this year’s Georgia primaries won’t be anything special. But right now, the early vote is about half of the total turnout in the 2018 primaries (not counting the GOP runoff). Legislation that Democrats insisted was a sinister plot to keep Georgians away from the polls has, so far, yielded a lot more Georgians coming out to vote.
About 565,000 people casted early votes in Georgia, per National Review. That is a 153 percent increase from 2018 and 189 percent from 2020.
Now that Stacey Abrams is back in the race to triumph her loss in the gubernatorial primary in 2018 and Herschel Walker is taking a stab at the Senate race following his glorification of former President Trump, more people seem to be interested in participating in the election.