WILL KOEPPEN

Early Voting Locations in Georgia During the 2024 General Election

Early voting locations across the state are largely unregulated and often don't correlate with the number of registered voters.

Words and Visuals by Will Koeppen

For the 2024 general election, I opted to vote early. It was easy — there was an early voting location just down the street at the local library — and I had almost three weeks to swing by. My assigned precinct location would have been further away, and I didn't have an interest in standing in line on November 5. There was a lot of media attention paid to the statewide early voting turnout and what it might mean for each candidate, but I didn't see anything at all about the distribution or availability of individual locations.

Early Voting Locations in Georgia, a Primer

The United States of America election system is highly decentralized. In many states, voting is overseen at the state level but is actually administered at the county level (with the exception of Alaska and Louisiana, which are proud to call their administrative subdivisions boroughs and parishes, respectively). This means that county officials, each with their own budgetary and facility limitations, hire and train election workers, and they determine how many voting locations will be open for both early voting and on Election Day.

During the 2020 election, a number of accusations about the voting system emerged. At the national level, Donald J. Trump called into question the electoral system even before the election, railed against mail-in ballots, and told his supporters to vote only on Election Day. In Georgia, which became one of the most contested states, Democrats pointed to long wait times at some Election Day polling elections which they alleged were more likely to occur in Democratic enclaves. Non-profit organizations poured money into Georgia counties to fund polling locations and staff in get-out-the-vote drives, but critics didn't like that certain counties got more than others.

Some of problems specific to early voting locations in 2020 were acknowledged in the lengthy GA Senate Bill 202, the "Election Integrity Act," which was drafted to respond to the purported issues.

The Election Integrety Act passed, and how voting is conducted in Georgia is now defined, sometimes in explicit detail, in the state's rules and regulations. For example, the rules mandate proofreading the pages of the ballot display on the touchscreen, says that blind voters who use an audio tactile interface won't be considered to have been "assisted" (unless they hand their ballot to a companion to place into the scanner, then they will), and during which hours "midday wait times" shall be measured (11 am to 3 pm). If you want to read one of the most dizzying paragraphs ever to explain a relatively simple idea, see here.

However, even with the newly added detail, it's not clear that data or statistics were used to update the legislation. Minimum hours at early voting sites are now prescribed, but the number of early or election-day voting locations and the amount of voting equipment to use is still left each county to decide for themselves, regardless of the population of the county.

A Map of Early Voting Locations in Georgia

For the 2024 November 5th US General Election, 159 counties within the state of Georgia made 346 locations available for early voting. I used the Georgia Secretary of State Early Voting Location Database, county websites, and news reports to make a map of early voting locations across Georgia. Each county is colored by the number of registered voters in the county divided by the number of early voting locations provided. The result shows that the number of people per early voting location in Georgia can vary widely.

Let's look at some of the county differences. Lee County had ~26,000 registered voters and made three early voting locations available. Whereas Dougherty County just to the south had ~70,000 registered voters but only provided one. Taliaferro County and Quitman County are the smallest counties in GA by population and have less than ~2,000 voters each, but they are still mandated to provide an early voting location. Whitefield, Barrow, and Rockdale counties are 50 times the size of Taliaferro County, but they also only provided one early voting location; each had to accommodate 65,000 to 70,000 registered voters. For reference, Fulton County, which covers a portion of the Atlanta metro area, has ~900,000 registered voters, and the county provided 44 geographically distributed early voting locations, amounting to ~20,000 voters per location.

The award for the least access to early voting locations in 2024 goes to Lowndes County on the Florida border. Lowndes County has ~87,000 registered voters, but only offered the bare, legislated minimum for early voting. Without traffic, the single location on the northern side of Valdosta is a 30-minute drive for someone living in Lake Park. Lowndes County will have 18 polling locations open on Election Day.

The Availability and Accuracy of Early Voting Information

Even if the county only provides one early voting location, it seems like the least we can do to promote voting is publish accurate names, addresses, and hours. The Georgia Secretary of State Early Voting Location Database compiles these locations and most county websites refer voters there for details about early voting locations. However, through this project I found numerous inaccuracies in the database. Many early locations had ambiguous or unintelligable building titles for voting locations such as "Office," "Election HQ," or "Old Gym." Occasionally there was no building title at all but only "AIP," which stands for "Advance In Person" but would not be clear to most people looking for a specific place to vote. Street names and abbreviation were not standardized, which is generally not the end of the world, but occasionally "Place" was substituted for "Plaza" (10 Park Place is not a valid address in Alpharetta, 10 Park Plaza is), or "Avenue" was used instead of "Street". These differences matter quite a bit when Chestnut Avenue runs north to south and Chestnut Street runs east to west.

It was not uncommon for early voting hours to be conflicting between information sources or missing entirely. Stewart County has an early voting location in the database but no hours were listed, for example. Worse, the www internet protocol for the Stewart County website was non-functional, which breaks a number of google links to the information. In Lowndes County, there were confusing differences in the information offered by the county and the state websites. Similarly, the Lowndes County website said, "Voters from all precincts can cast their votes up to 21 days before Election Day at the Lowndes County Elections Office" but did not provide hours. According to Google Maps the office is open from 8 am to 5pm. However, the Georgia Secretary of State database listed early voting hours at the Lowndes County Elections Office only from October 28th to November 1rst from 7 am to 7 pm.

Lastly, a number of counties had no early voting locations listed in the database at all when early voting began on October 15, 2024. I began this project on October 17 and ten counties had no information about their early voting sites in the official database. I was able to collect the information manually from most county websites and/or news articles, and I wrote an email to support@sos.ga.gov with the collected information. I didn't get a response; however, by October 28 the Secretary of State's Office had quietly updated six of the missing counties, and a few days later they added two more. Unfortunately, early voting locations for Clinch County and Seminole County were never made available through the database durign the early voting period.

Does Early Voting Work?

Overall, Georgia saw record turnout via early voting in the November 5, 2024 General Election. So how should we think about how early voting is evolving? It's complicated.

In a repeat of 2020, Trump sent his supporters mixed messages about early voting in 2024, telling supporters to go to the polls early while calling into question their security:

Georgia reports a lot of information about the demographics of early voters, but it does not report on party affiliations. Other states (e.g., Alaska) report less inividual information but do include party affiliation. The Alaska results show that more registered Republicans took advantage of early voting in 2024 than in 2020. But it's hard to say any more than that, because of the complications of the pandemic in 2020, the unproven rhetoric questioning election integrity in 2020, and the changes to election procedures prior in advance of 2024.

What is clear is that counties continue to hold a large amount of responsibility in the availability of early voting, and there are major differences between counties in prioritizing or effectively avoiding setting up additional early voting locations.

A potential problem with the current Georgia state legislation is that an increase in early voting locations could lead to a decrease in Election Day locations in the future. The number of Election Day locations are loosely regulated by Georgia state law, which notes that if a voting precinct recieved more than 2,000 voters during the previous election and wait times were longer than one hour, the superintendent should reduce the size of the precinct or provide more voting equipment. There are no such regulations for early voting locations, nor directives to open more early voting locations if there is demand. Meanwhile, if a rise in early voting reduces voter turnout on Election Day, counties could find themselves justified to reduce the number of Election Day precincts in order to save money. A now-controversial 2015 memo by then Secretary of State Brian Kemp provided advice to counties on just how to do that. Closing Election Day locations, which are currently more geographically-distributed than early voting locations, could actually hurt turnout from voters who are less mobile.

That's a Wrap

People who do vote worry about our country. A lot. Voting provides legitamacy to our democratic ideals ("all men are created equal") even though we actually live in a constitutional republic filtered by an electoral college where no one is equal. About a third of Americans have given up on the process, accepting the rights of being American citizens but feeling like they don't have any real agency in it. But for the majority of us, elections are the one time every few years when it feels like we have (or hope we have) an individual say in our country's direction.

In an ideal election system, every person would care enough to vote, it would be easy to do so, votes are not tampered with, and the results are quickly made available. Unfortunately, the US election system is not ideal: it is a historical system created in 1787, modified and band-aided multiple times, and today loosely binds together a patchwork of state and county systems that each administer elections in their own way. Each county has its own process and election equipment, sometimes dictated by state law and sometimes not. Early voting is a compromise that bows both to those who feel that voting must be done in person and those who want to expand voting access by providing a longer time period over which to vote. The percentage of Americans who vote early has steadily increased since it was introduced in the 2000 election. People in Lowndes County may desperately want an additional early voting location in Dasher or Lake Park, but the county would need to designate funds to host and staff those locations, and there is not always a mechanism or will to do so.

I'm a proponent of getting rid of the electoral college. I think a one person, one vote system would be simple to implement, easy to understand, and most of all, it would be fair. I also think we should be using standardized technology to do it. We live in a time when digital account and identity verification is ubiquitous, trillions of dollars are moved securely and instantaneously across the internet every second, and we can track every fraction of every bitcoin. Surely we can figure out how to securely give everyone in America a single vote and a way to track their own voting history. I know not everyone agrees. The newly-partisan Georgia State Election Board, for example, wants to return to hand-counting digitally-printed ballots. (Note: Humans are so predictably bad at counting things that there are equations we use to calculate our own standard error.) That's OK, we live in a democr ... err, constitutional republic.