Georgia early voters continue setting records

More than 1.8 million Georgians cast their ballots during the first week of early voting, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said Wednesday.

That record number, which included early votes through Tuesday, was expected to cross the 2 million mark by midday Wednesday, representing more than 26% of the state’s electorate.

Raffensperger reported the early voting numbers during a news conference in which he also revealed that a citizenship audit his office conducted last summer turned up only 20 non-U.S. citizens on Georgia’s voter rolls out of 8.2 million registered voters. The secretary of state’s office canceled their voter registrations

“Georgia has the cleanest voter list in the entire country,” Raffensperger said. “Georgians can trust in their elections.”

Gabriel Sterling, the agency’s chief operating officer, said the 20 registered voters who turned out not to be citizens were identified because they had signed affidavits indicating they weren’t citizens in order to get out of jury duty. They came from Bibb, Clayton, Cobb, DeKalb, Fulton, Gwinnett, and Henry counties, he said.

Sterling said the secretary of state’s office referred156 other registered voters suspected of being non-citizens to local authorities for further investigation.

Raffensperger said the agency identified 432,474 registered voters last year who have changed residences, moving either inside Georgia or out of state. He credited those results to Georgia’s membership in the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), a network of states that share data on voters.

“I believe every state should be a member of ERIC,” he said.

Sterling also shot down a conspiracy theory that Georgia’s Dominion voting system has been “flipping” votes.

“There’s zero evidence of machines flipping votes,” he said. “That was true in 2020, and it’s true now.”

Sterling said non-citizens have no incentive for trying to game the voter registration system because, if they get caught, they lose their chance to become a citizen.

“It’s very high risk and low reward,” he said.

Early voting in Georgia will continue through Nov. 1, four days before Election Day.

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