Election Day is upon us. For months, county elections directors have been training poll workers, collaborating with local law enforcement on security plans, and preparing to count and report the votes smoothly, amid a heated and chaotic political climate.
Given the times, metro-Atlanta elections directors are expecting an onslaught of misinformation aimed at sowing chaos and doubt in the integrity of the presidential election result, especially if it’s close in Georgia.
Elections officials in Cobb, DeKalb, Fulton, and Gwinnett Counties told Atlanta Civic Circle they are ready. Multiple inquiries to Clayton County officials went unanswered last week.
A smooth election, so far
Early voting, which ended Friday, went without a hitch, the four metro-Atlanta county elections directors said.
There are “no incidents to report,” said Cobb County Elections Director Tate Fall, when Atlanta Civic Circle checked in during early voting.
In DeKalb, brief power outages were the only issue. “Thanks to our internal protocols, we have successfully navigated minor technical issues (i.e. short-lived power outages) — none of these causing a delay or impact in voting,” said DeKalb spokesperson Erik Burton via email.
Gwinnett’s elections supervisor, Zach Manifold, also reported a smooth process. “We feel like we’re in a pretty good spot,” he said.
At the close of early voting on Friday, over 4 million Georgians had cast a ballot – making up 55.5% of the state’s 7.2 million active voters, according to data from the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office.
The five metro-Atlanta counties alone cast upwards of 1.46 million votes or over 36% of the absentee and in-person ballots cast by the Nov. 1 cutoff. Fulton voters alone cast nearly 443,000 advance and mail-in ballots — the highest for any Georgia county going into Election Day.
Gwinnett, for one, surpassed its 2020 early voting turnout. That’s a good thing, both because it shows voter enthusiasm, and it takes strain off the system on Election Day, Manifold said.
Over half of Gwinnett’s electorate voted early, he added. “That’s definitely a relief to our Election Day operations. … We won’t have nearly the amount of people still to vote when we get to Election Day. It relieves the pressure on the system.”
Security plans in place
Gwinnett elections officials have been meeting regularly with local law enforcement for over six months on the security plan for Nov. 5. “We have a plan in place with local law enforcement for Election Day,” Manifold said.
Other counties have done the same. Fall, the Cobb elections director,said care has been taken to make sure poll workers are safe. “We have an increased law enforcement presence at all of our voting locations and poll managers have been given police radios, so that they can speak directly to a dispatcher,” she said. “This will allow assistance, whether medical or safety-related, to be dispatched quickly and accurately.”
Likewise in Fulton, “Safety instruction is part of all trainings provided to poll workers. Additionally, security personnel are assigned to each polling location during the advance voting period and on Election Day,” said Fulton spokesperson Regina Waller in an email.
Results on Election Day?
How quickly a victor emerges after the polls close at 7 p.m. on Nov. 5 comes down to how close the race is. Keep in mind that the elections directors for each of Georgia’s 159 counties have until 5 p.m. on Nov. 12, the Tuesday after the election, to certify their county’s results and deliver them to the Secretary of State’s Office. (Ordinarily the deadline is the Monday after Election Day, but Nov. 11 is a state holiday.)
That said, the Secretary of State’s Office expects the lion’s share of the vote to be reported within an hour of polls closing. Counties must publicly report the tallies from all early votes and accepted absentee ballots by 8 p.m. on Election Day, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said on CBS’ Face the Nation on Oct. 20.
“That’s 70, maybe even 75% of all the vote totals [that] will be reported no later than 8 p.m. on Election Night,” Raffensperger said.
That leaves only the votes from Election Day for each county to count after the polls close at 7 p.m. “The first report that will go up will be significant,” said Manifold in Gwinnett.
The remaining votes from Election Day will be publicly reported as fast as counties can count them. Remember that each precinct cannot start counting votes until it closes. That means if a judge ordered a polling place to remain open later than 7 p.m. for some reason, such as a technical issue that impeded a polling place’s operations earlier in the day, that precinct’s vote count will be delayed.
Similarly, anyone who gets in line to vote before 7 p.m. is allowed to remain in line and vote – even if that means they cast their ballot after 7 p.m. That also delays when the precinct can start counting votes.
“It seems like for presidential elections, a lot of people show up in that last hour, so we’ll probably still have decent lines at seven o’clock, when we close. We have to vote all those people before we can start shutting down,” said Manifold.
All of the in-person ballots from Election Day and early voting will be counted “probably pretty close to midnight” on Nov. 5, Manifold said. But he cautioned that provisional in-person ballots, mail-in ballots for military and overseas Georgians, and mail-in ballots that need to be cured, which all make up a small percentage of the vote, won’t be counted that night.
Provisional ballots must first go through a validation process, and military and overseas ballots are allowed to arrive within three days of Election Day. The deadline to “cure,” or validate, any outstanding mail-in ballots is also 5 p.m. on Friday, Nov. 8.
“So there’s a couple of different categories — small categories — of votes that’ll still be outstanding,” after Election Day, Manifold explained. Those ballots must be counted before a county can certify the vote and deliver it to the Secretary of State’s Office on Tuesday, Nov. 12.
How much of a difference will those outstanding ballots make to the results that get reported on Nov. 5? “It just depends on how close races are at the end of Election Night, right?” Manifold said.
If, as in 2020, the presidential race in Georgia comes down to a fraction of a percentage point, these outstanding votes may be decisive, which would delay knowing who has won until after Election Day.
How decisive? Gwinnett residents in 2020, for example, cast about 416,000 votes – or about 10% of the statewide total. Manifold said that after Nov. 5 there could easily be a few thousand provisional ballots, several hundred military and overseas ballots, and a few hundred mail-in ballots that still need to be counted.
Multiply those few thousand ballots by 10, and that’s the number of statewide ballots that will still be outstanding between the Tuesday election and Nov. 12.
In other words, if the difference in the statewide vote total on Election Day between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump is less than the expected outstanding vote from mail-in cures, overseas, military and provisional ballots, then expect to wait several days for the final, certified tally to determine a victor.
Combating misinformation
After the polls close on Election Day, where is the best place to get accurate election results? Elections officials across metro-Atlanta emphasized that their county election websites are the best source of real-time information. “If you have any questions, go straight to the source,” said Fall, Cobb’s elections director.
Or, check the Secretary of State’s election website for county-by-county and statewide results. You can find links to all of these websites here: How to find reliable, real-time results on Election Night.
Note that there may be a temporary discrepancy in real time between a county’s vote totals on its own website and the Secretary of State’s website. All that means is that a county may report its local precinct totals first, so there is a slight lag untilthe Secretary of State’s website updates.
Also keep in mind that elections are administered by county, so there are slight variations in how they report their vote counts. Not every county uses the same vendor for reporting vote totals.
“Everybody just needs to be patient. You’ll see things updated at different times and at different speeds,” Manifold said.
In the past, that sort of minor, temporary variation in vote totals would never be noted on social media or elsewhere, but in the current political climate, anything is fertile ground for weaving conspiracy theories.
The county elections officials encourage people to turn to them with these questions. For those whose doubts persist about vote outcomes, Manifold said to keep in mind that elections are run by the community. The question to ask yourself, he added, is do you trust your neighbors?
“When you hear all the misinformation and the noise and a lot of the stuff out there — when it comes down to it, elections are run by your community,” he said. “Here in Gwinnett, we’ll have 2,000 citizens that are going to volunteer their day and get paid very little money — and work a very long day in service to their community and elections.”
“Your neighbors are the ones that run your polling location,” Manifold said. “That is the PTA parents, the grandparents, the teachers, the firefighters — those are the people that volunteer their day to make elections happen. Without the community, we could never make this thing happen.”