ATLANTA — So far, Georgians are flocking to the polls and sending in absentee ballots for the Jan. 5 Senate runoff races that's tracking close behind participation in the Nov. 3 general election.
Interest has been high in the runoffs, with control of the U.S. Senate on the line - if at least one of the Republican incumbent Sens. Kelly Loeffler or David Perdue win, the GOP will maintain control. If Democratic challengers Rev. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff can pull off a sweep, it would result in a 50-50 split in the Senate that would be broken by Vice President-elect Kamala Harris' tiebreaker vote.
According to figures obtained by 11Alive's Joe Ripley early Thursday morning, so far more than 900,000 votes have been cast in the runoffs in the three days since the early voting period started on Monday.
It breaks down with a fairly even split of more than 486,000 in-person votes and more than 426,000 absentee votes. There were more than 1.2 million absentee ballot requests submitted. About 1,400 of those were rejected.
How does that compare to the first three days of the Nov. 3 election?
According to a release put out by the Secretary of State's Office on Oct. 16 at noon - early voting had started that week on Oct. 12 - there had been a little more than 1.2 million votes cast at that point. That included more than 615,000 in-person ballots and more than 600,000 absentee ballots.
Depending on how many people have gone to the polls this morning, the current pace of early voting has seen a rate of about 75% of what it was during the general election.
In the 2018 governor's race between Brian Kemp and Stacey Abrams, there were a little under 4 million votes cast. A December runoff for Secretary of State that followed (incidentally, an election that wound up having major implications for this one), ended up with almost 1.5 million total votes.
This race seems well on its way to surpassing that level of re-participation.