Bernard Reynolds · October 24, 2026
What does Georgia's early vote look like from the smallest county in the state? I spent part of this morning with the full county table to find out. Here are the questions I kept asking, and what the numbers say.
As of 11:34 a.m. ET today, Saturday, October 24, about 1,670,000 Georgians have an accepted early ballot. That's the state's own count and the newest one posted. It's a little more than one voter in five, and about 200,000 came in since yesterday morning. Early-vote totals measure participation, not preference.
Taliaferro County, a little east of Atlanta, is the smallest in the count. Just under 300 ballots are in, up a couple dozen since yesterday morning. Echols County, on the Florida line, is next with just over 300. They aren't alone. Twenty-six counties have fewer than 1,000 early ballots each, and half of Georgia's 159 counties are under about 3,400.
Now the other end. Fulton has about 201,000. That's nearly 700 times Taliaferro. Nearly seven hundred to one.
No. Fulton added about 22,000 in the latest stretch, the most of any county. But the fastest growth came from Walker County, in the northwest corner of the state. It went from about 3,700 to about 4,800, up by about 30 percent. Not the biggest. The fastest. I can't tell you why Walker jumped, and I'd rather say so than guess.
One caution. The stretch between the last two official counts ran a few hours longer than a day, so every one-day change gets a bit of extra credit.
GeorgiaVotes, which tracks both years on the same footing, has 2026 nearly 6 percent ahead of this point in 2022 as of today. It uses a different source and a different clock than the state's count, so I use it for that one comparison and nothing else. Why the gap keeps growing, I don't know.
Georgia doesn't register voters by party, so nobody can hand you an official split. The data firm L2 builds a model from voter files. Its estimate, stamped 9:26 a.m. today and covering about 1.6 million early voters, is about 54 percent Democratic, 39 percent Republican and 8 percent neither. It's arithmetic on records, not anyone's answer to a question, and there's no 2022 version to compare it with.
Official ballots as of 11:34 a.m. ET Saturday, with the change since the previous morning. Modeled shares are L2's estimate of each county's own early voters, not official numbers.
Every county sits inside somebody's House district. To a statistician, a county that small is a rounding error. To the member who represents it, those are neighbors. Politics is local, and it starts from the ground up.
When the General Assembly convenes on January 11, committee chairs will remember who knew the small places by name, not just the big ones. Small communities often don't have a lobbyist, a staff or a spare afternoon. They have a phone number for their member. It's one thing to be counted. It's another to be known.
So here's what I'd ask you. Who is your House member, and do they know your name? And what would it mean for your community if the first time they heard it was in January? Trust is easier to build when nobody needs anything yet.
Early voting runs through Friday, October 30, and Election Day is November 3. If you have something coming in 2027 and want to talk it through, grab a time with me: https://calendly.com/bernardreynolds/true-north-strategy-conversation
Bernard Reynolds is the principal of True North Strategies, a Georgia public affairs firm.
