How Ga. officials plan to make future elections run smoothly

AUGUSTA, Ga. (WRDW/WAGT) - After a runoff election watched around the country, officials in Georgia are already starting to plan and prepare for the next election cycle.

With record turnout numbers for early voting, they’re looking to improve the process.

We spoke with the Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, to see their plan moving forward. On Tuesday, 1.6 million people came out to vote in Georgia.

A bigger turnout than the state had just four months ago for the governor’s race. Raffensperger says improvements can always be made and their end.

With more than 75 voting precincts open, it was smooth sailing in Richmond County.

“We’ve got a lot of counties, so it’s a lot of moving parts. And they worked flawless almost yesterday. Only four precincts stayed open late. It was a great experience for voters,” he said.

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But over the past two years, Georgia has shown it’s fond of early voting. Walter Santiago is a Richmond County voter. He said, “This is the first time in recent elections I’ve seen where people were fueled by purpose to vote, and they felt the intention, and they took to the polls.”

Record early voting totaled more than 1.7 million.

Raffensperger said: “Now, coming up the next session, we will talk the General Assembly. One thing we would recommend with the current runoff structure that we have, if we’re going to keep that, we need to really tell the counties we have to have more precincts open for early voting that makes sure we can move all those voters through on the general.”

In 2021, the state voted to shorten the timeline and move the runoffs to four weeks after election day, causing confusion for people like Santiago.

“I think what confused me there was the amount of time I had,” he said.

Raffensperger said: “I think we need to clarify how many days of early voting we have during that process, and then just have additional precincts open.”

If one thing has become clear, it’s that more early voting precincts are needed.

“Yesterday, we pushed 1.6 million people through there, not a single line. And so we had lines when we had 300,000. Well, because we didn’t have very many precincts open. So you have to have, you know, the number of precincts,” he said.

Raffensperger says it’s the little things that make the biggest difference, and they are looking to make sure all 159 counties have a better uniform process in the future for an even better turnout.

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