Georgia smashes turnout records ahead of final day of early voting

GEORGIA – Friday is the last day of early voting in Georgia.

Officials said the state has already crushed early voting numbers with over half of active voters casting their ballots.

RELATED | Early voting in Georgia begins Tuesday: When, where to vote in your county and what to bring to the polls

Just days away from the election, attempts have been made to undermine the integrity of the process in the key battleground state.

The Georgia Secretary of State’s office said it became aware of a video purporting to show a Haitian migrant with multiple Georgia IDs claiming to have voted multiple times.

The state called the video “targeted disinformation” and claimed it is likely foreign interference, and asked social media companies to remove similar videos.

Minister Brad Raffensperger released a statement Thursday night saying:

“As Americans, we cannot allow our enemies to use lies to divide us and undermine our faith in our institutions — or each other,” he said.

Chief Operating Officer Gabe Sterling added that users need to think twice before posting again.

“It’s at a higher level now. And I know people are talking about artificial intelligence and everything. You don’t have to have AI. You have to have a random person make a random claim and it gets retweeted by an influencer or put on TikTok and it’s kind of rolling out there, Sterling said. “One of the things I tell people all the time is if you have a biased itch, it’s a piece of information scratches on social media. Take it with a grain of salt, try to find other sources of information to make sure it’s real before you start spreading it yourself.”

Through 17 days of early voting in the Peach State, voter turnout is already over 50%. Towns County leads the way with almost 70% having voted.

So far, over 3.5 million ballots have been cast in Georgia.

RELATED | Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger celebrates a milestone as the Georgians break 3 million

State officials assured voters they are prepared for the spotlight to be on them.

“Well, we’ve done more to invest in roll maintenance and than any other state in the country. We have arguably the cleanest voting roll in America. We just did a citizenship audit to show that we have no non-citizens on the roll .We found some that have been registered before we became Real ID state all the way back in 2012, most of which have not participated in any voting activity at all, but we went ahead and canceled those 20 out of 8.2 million. And what we see is that we use voter ID for every type of voting, early in-person voting, voting on election day, so we have a very secure system, we know it’s safe, we know that it’s safe and we know it’s easy to vote,” Sterling said.

The secretary of state’s office said it expects an increase in voter turnout today.

For those who cannot make it, they will have to wait until Election Day on Tuesday.