2020 Absentee/Early Voting thread

[GeorgiaModerate]

As of yesterday:

Nearly 800,000 Georgians, or about one in nine active voters, have already requested an absentee ballot, as state officials encourage the use of early voting to minimize lines at the polls for the November election.

https://www.gpb.org/news/2020/09/02/nearly-800000-georgians-have-already-requested-absentee-ballots-for-november

This includes:

- 582K on the "rollover" list of voters who checked a box to receive an absentee ballot for every election in a given cycle. That designation is for voters who are over 65, are disabled, are in the military, or living overseas.

- 175K have applied for a ballot by email, fax, mail or hand-delivering an application to their local election office.

- 41K (including me) have used the state's new online absentee request portal that launched last Friday.

Some county statistics:

- Leading the way is Fulton County, where more 80K total applications have been received, including 10K online requests.

- 13 of Georgia's 159 counties have seen more than 15% of their active voters already request an absentee ballot, including 20% of Greene County's voters.

- On the flip side, 11 counties have processed zero absentee ballot requests other than those on the rollover list.

Also:

- Ballots normally must be received by 7 p.m. on Election Day, but a recent federal court ruling changed the deadline to three days after Election Day as long as it is postmarked by Tuesday, November 3.

- All applications processed before September 15 will be paid for and mailed out by the state on September 18.  Counties can also begin processing - but not tabulating - absentee ballots two weeks before the election.

[GeorgiaModerate]

Michael McDonald has a site up to track early voting: https://electproject.github.io/Early-Vote-2020G/index.html.  Obviously there's scant data so far, but there is some.

[GeorgiaModerate]

https://twitter.com/gercohen/status/1303360034135576576

[GeorgiaModerate]

https://twitter.com/srl/status/1303528295762481155

[GeorgiaModerate]

https://twitter.com/JZTessler/status/1304080846505349120?s=20

A judge has extended Georgia's deadline to Nov. 6, although the state has appealed this.

[GeorgiaModerate]

Oklahoma County getting an early jump on mailing ballots:

https://twitter.com/CarmenMForman/status/1305956290909405184

[GeorgiaModerate]

I'm hoping either tonight or tomorrow night, the absentee voter file will be available via SoS:

https://elections.sos.ga.gov/Elections/voterabsenteefile.do

I'm thinking maybe since the state is processing & mailing all online mail ballots requested by September 15 (and mailing them out on 9/18), that is why it has taken so long for this data to appear (usually it shows up in early September). After today, the counties will begin processing & mailing all mail ballot requests themselves, so perhaps we'll see the absentee file finally appear sometime this week at minimum.

It's finally up! Unfortunately, there's no statewide file like usual - just 159 individual county files.

I'm obviously not digging through the individual files and I've never had much luck at merging them in the past, but based on packed/unpacked file sizes and the number of voters in the largest counties, it appears we're somewhere in the vicinity of 875,000 - 950,000 requested mail ballots in GA as of Tuesday (this includes people who voted in the primary who were 65+, who automatically receive ballots for all elections within a cycle).

I can confirm that the new Georgia ballot request site works - the file shows my application was received.

[GeorgiaModerate]

It's never great to get too excited about 18-29 non-voter figures, because, well, a large percentage of them wouldn't have been eligible to vote four years ago, and all of the rest would have been 18-24 (which of course is the lowest turnout segment of voters). This number does seems higher than usual, but it's not uncommon for 40-50% of first-time voters to fall into this category.

Another factor to consider is that many of these people probably voted in 2018 (the stat isn't "first-time voters" technically, but non-2016 voters). Many of these voters are likely already baked into the demographic cake of 2018's results.

The same stat is still interesting, albeit when it's calculated differently than on the website: 19% of '16 non-voter mail applications are from 18-29s.

Also, given that like half of the total requested ballots are automatically being sent out to senior citizens because of their age and the fact they voted by mail in the primary, 18-29s being close to 15% of all who have proactively applied for mail ballots for the general election alone is pretty amazing. Under normal circumstances, you'd probably expect that number in GA to be in the 5-10% range.

An anecdote: one of my kids (in her late 20s) has always hated politics and didn't even want to have it discussed around her.  The other day I texted her and said "I know you're not interested in politics, so I'll only mention this once because I think it's important.  I'd like to encourage you to register and vote for Biden."  She responded "way ahead of you".

[GeorgiaModerate]

https://twitter.com/marceelias/status/1306311077815291904

[GeorgiaModerate]

https://twitter.com/marceelias/status/1306963341429141504

[GeorgiaModerate]

https://twitter.com/amandawgolden/status/1307296601271078918

[GeorgiaModerate]

Georgia voters wondering if their absentee ballots will be counted can now receive text messages, emails or phone calls to track their ballot’s progress.

A service called BallotTrax launched Friday to allow voters to sign up for alerts when their absentee ballots are issued, received and accepted.

https://www.ajc.com/politics/absentee-ballot-tracking-service-launched-for-georgia-voters/DIY2BMWKHZBR3N2GKYX4P4O2LU/

The Georgia BallotTrax site is at https://georgia.ballottrax.net/.  I've signed up for email updates.  But https://ballottrax.net/voter/ seems to be a generic address, so this may work for other states as well.

[GeorgiaModerate]

I keep checking this thread hoping to see Georgia updates every time there's a new post, haha

Check this site, updated daily: http://georgiavotes.com/

[GeorgiaModerate]

https://twitter.com/rachelwalexande/status/1311777436061761536

[GeorgiaModerate]

I know it’s still super early, but the Georgia votes look very good for Biden so far. The whites/black number is roughly 56-34, which is much better than it was in 2018 when Abrams’ only lost by 1%. On top of that, nearly half of the Latino/Asian votes banked thus far did not vote in 2016/2018. Dare I say that it might be “just there yet”?

One thing to keep in mind that the initial flood of absentee ballots hasn't even fully gone out in Georgia, let alone been returned.  We just got our ballots in Forsyth County yesterday, even though they were requested on the portal 8/28 and "issued" on 9/18.  I also heard that Gwinnett has mailed less than half of its ballots so far (it has a unique issue: larger envelopes that required a special printer because they are required to be printed in both English and Spanish -- the only county in Georgia with such a requirement.)

[GeorgiaModerate]

We (wife, son, and I) just filled out our ballots and took them to the dropbox.  That's three votes for Biden, Ossoff, and Warnock.

[GeorgiaModerate]

Wow. When she was born, women were still 2 years away from getting the right to vote. Massive FF.

I grew up near my great-grandmother.  She was born in 1889 and vividly remembered women getting the right to vote.

[GeorgiaModerate]

AJC: More absentee ballots cast in Georgia so far than in all of 2016

[GeorgiaModerate]

Campaigns are definitely looking at who's voted.  Shortly after we submitted our absentee ballot applications, we started getting postcards urging us to return our ballots as soon as possible and vote for a particular candidate.  Most of them were from Republicans, though, so I doubt the actual result was what they were hoping for.

[GeorgiaModerate]

Speaking of Georgia early voting:

Since Georgia’s chaotic primary last spring, election officials have scrambled to prevent another debacle.

Election directors across Georgia have hired thousands of poll workers, added tech support staff, bought additional voting equipment and improved absentee ballot processing times. They’ve been stocking up on masks and reviewing plans to social distance to protect voters and staff from the coronavirus.
...
Over 40,000 potential poll workers expressed interest to the secretary of state’s office, nonprofit groups and businesses, and their names were forwarded to local election officials to make hiring decisions.

But in some counties, staffing remains an issue for both early voting and Election Day.

https://www.ajc.com/politics/as-voting-starts-monday-georgia-aims-to-avoid-another-meltdown/5N2JKLBGM5GX7ODJUGMPOSJI3U/

More details at the link.

[GeorgiaModerate]

How do we know the villages has seen such a shift?

It's evident on the ground. I sh*t you not, there was literally a golf cart parade held in support of him. That's not something Hillary or Obama ever got (but Trump did).

This is just a Biden version of boaters for Trump. The Villages has well over 100K people, even a small percent of that would be many thousands of votes. Assuming this golf cart parade wasn't attended by tens of thousands of people, it doesn't tell us anything.

It's not quantitative evidence, but the fact that in a community where Democrats have always felt completely outnumbered and afraid to be public, you're pulling together enough to feel bold enough to go public and have multiple events (recently a ballot drop-off) is as meaningful as people noticing in late 2016, wow, there are a lot of Trump signs in rural Pennsylvania and northern Maine.

AP has a long article this morning about The Villages and the election.  Well worth reading.

https://apnews.com/article/election-2020-virus-outbreak-seniors-florida-michael-pence-b8bbfd3a87dc290a84b9ed9915a4cf63

[GeorgiaModerate]

Thread of Early Voting lines in GA
https://twitter.com/nicolecarrwsb/status/1315626970953256960?s=21

Ofc GA was going to have it's fair share of problems

On the bright side, it seems like people are very eager to vote, which is a good thing.

The first day of early voting usually has enthusiastic turnout.  Let's see what it looks like on Wednesday or Thursday.

[GeorgiaModerate]

https://twitter.com/clairecmc/status/1315691917817139206

This is why I voted by mail this year.  I figured the lines would be horrendous.

[GeorgiaModerate]

We're gonna get daily early voting turnout reports from Georgia, right?

Follow this site, updated daily: http://georgiavotes.com/

[GeorgiaModerate]

We're gonna get daily early voting turnout reports from Georgia, right?

Follow this site, updated daily: http://georgiavotes.com/

If these numbers are accurate, that’s a massive increase from both 2016 and 2018.

I’m assuming this is accounting for mail-in ballots received also?

So far it's all mail-in.  Early in-person voting started today.