Bernard Reynolds · October 30, 2026
Today is the last day of early voting in Georgia, and the state has already counted about 2.53 million ballots. I want to spend this post on what that number can tell you and what it can't.
As of 8:34 a.m. ET on Oct 30, the Secretary of State's count shows about 2.53 million accepted early ballots. That is a bit more than one voter in three out of about 7.5 million active voters. About 210,000 of those ballots came in since yesterday morning.
Mail ballots are a smaller piece. About 166,000 have been requested, about 113,000 have come back, and about 112,000 of those are accepted. That leaves roughly 53,000 requested mail ballots still out. If you are one of those people, today and Tuesday are the days to get it back or vote in person.
GeorgiaVotes counts both years the same way. It has 2026 at about 2.51 million early votes against about 2.27 million at this point in 2022. That puts us about 11 percent ahead. A day ago the gap was about 10 percent, so it is still growing.
I'd be careful with that comparison. It lines up the same date on the calendar, so it shows how quickly people are voting, not how many will vote in the end. GeorgiaVotes is also a different source on a different clock than the state's count, so the two will not match exactly. Use it for the 2022 comparison and nothing else.
Georgia does not register voters by party, so any split is an estimate. The data firm L2 models each voter's likely leaning. As of 9:27 a.m. ET today, its estimate for early voters is about 52 percent Democratic, 38 percent Republican and 10 percent neither. That is modeled, not official. It guesses who showed up, not how anyone voted, and we have no 2022 version to compare it to.
Every one of Georgia's 159 counties added ballots since yesterday, including the smallest, Taliaferro. The big metro counties still carry most of the weight. Here is where they stand, with the L2 modeled party shares (Democratic, Republican, neither):
Together the five largest counties hold about 40 percent of the statewide total. Those county shares are modeled estimates too, so read them as a rough picture of who has voted so far.
The state's count is the official one. GeorgiaVotes lets us compare to 2022. The party split is a model built from voter files. Each does one job, and none of them predicts who wins. A big early number tells you about participation. It does not tell you about preference, and it says nothing about the people who have not voted yet.
After today, early voting is over and Election Day is Tuesday, Nov 3. The number I'll be watching is not the early total. It is how many of the voters who have not cast a ballot show up on Tuesday. I don't know that answer and I'd rather say so than guess.
The people elected this fall will write the rules in the 2027 session, and that session comes fast. Relationships get built before you need them, not after. If your organization has an issue coming in 2027 and nobody carrying it, start that conversation now.
Schedule a strategy conversation: https://calendly.com/bernardreynolds/true-north-strategy-conversation
Bernard Reynolds is the principal of True North Strategies, a Georgia public affairs firm.
