By Maggie Lee
Some 3.5 million Georgians cast a ballot for either Herschel Walker or Raphael Warnock for the U.S. Senate in the December 2022 runoff. And somewhere around that many sat out the runoff altogether.
It’s fairly easy to count how many people voted in an election — just count the number of ballots in the first race on the ballot. Unofficial results on Dec. 7 with all precincts reporting put turnout for the Walker-Warner senate runoff at 3,535,579 voters. That’s in a state with at least 7 million potential voters, no matter how you count them.
The exact number of people who didn’t vote is a little hard to pinpoint. As of Dec. 5, 2022, Georgia had 7,867,387 voters on its registration roll, according to the official state count. But that tally is a little too big; it’ll include some dead people or people who have moved away but haven't been removed from the voter roll yet.
There’s another official state count of “active” voters — people who have voted in the last seven or eight years. Georgia has 7,011,421 of those folks. But just counting “active voters” misses living Georgians from the registered voter list who have a right to vote and are registered, but just haven’t done so in a while.
For the sake of having a consistent baseline that isn’t affected by changes in state law on voter list maintenance, Atlanta Civic Circle used that larger number, total registered voters, to calculate voter turnout.
And we see that generally, millions of Georgians aren't casting ballots.
Check out the same data as above, but in a table.