Democratic presidential nominee and former vice president Joe Biden speaks during a campaign stop in Warm Springs, Ga., on Oct. 27, 2020. (Biden campaign video)
Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden rallied in Warm Springs, Ga., and Atlanta Tuesday to deliver a speech focused on unity and healing with one week left before the general election on Nov. 3.
Biden’s appearance at the retreat of former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt highlighted Georgia’s growing importance as a potential swing state after years of firm Republican control and high hopes among local Democratic leaders for flipping state legislative, congressional and U.S. Senate seats.
In a roughly 20-minute speech, the former vice president invoked Warm Springs as a place of healing for the polio-stricken Roosevelt, likening it to the symbolic healing Biden said his campaign offers in contrast to the often chaotic administration of President Donald Trump and the COVID-19 pandemic.
“This place, Warm Springs, is a reminder that though broken, each of us can be healed,” Biden said. “That as a people and a country, we can overcome this devastating virus, that we can heal a suffering world and, yes, we can restore our soul and save our country.”
Recent polls have shown Biden and Trump neck-and-neck in the fight for Georgia’s 16 electoral votes, which have not gone to a Democratic presidential candidate since 1992.
Biden has sought to emphasize Trump’s response to coronavirus as evidence of the president’s being unfit for office and out of step with average Americans. Trump has largely stuck with questioning Biden’s physical health and likening his policies to socialism.
Georgia Democrats are banking on changing demographics and voting patterns, particularly in the Atlanta suburbs, to help flip the presidency, a congressional seat and control of the state House of Representatives in their favor.
Trump’s campaign and state Republican leaders are not sweating Biden’s late-race appearance in Georgia despite Trump’s narrow margin of victory in the 2016 election and strengthening support for Democrats Jon Ossoff and Rev. Raphael Warnock, who are competing for the state’s two U.S. Senate seats.
The president’s campaign was quick to note its field organizers have fanned out across the state and reached millions of people via mailers and phone calls.
“After ignoring Georgia for months, a last-minute visit from Biden won’t make a dent in the advantage we’ve built thanks to our field army and frequent visits from President Trump and his family,” said Savannah Viar, a Trump campaign spokeswoman.
The president as well as his son, Donald Trump Jr., and daughter, Ivanka Trump, have made several stops in Georgia in recent months. Tuesday’s speech in Warm Springs was Biden’s first visit to Georgia since winning his party’s nomination.
Speaking at a second rally Tuesday evening in Atlanta, Biden framed Georgia as a battleground state this election especially due to its two U.S. Senate seats being up for grabs, saying, “I can’t tell you how important it is that we flip the United States Senate.”
“There’s no state more consequential than Georgia in that fight,” Biden said.
Biden was joined at a get-out-the-vote rally in Atlanta Tuesday evening by Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, local elected officials and the musician Common. His visit came on the heels of a campaign stop last week by his running mate, Kamala Harris.
While Biden spoke in Warm Springs, Ossoff and Warnock joined forces as they have done frequently in recent months to hold a rally in Jonesboro.
Trump supporters including Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp also rallied in Manchester, Ga., just outside Warm Springs. Warnock’s opponents, U.S. Kelly Loeffler and U.S. Rep. Doug Collins, were scheduled Tuesday and throughout this week for campaign events elsewhere in the state.
The three-week early voting period, which has already drawn more than 3 million votes in Georgia along with absentee ballots, is set to last through Friday.
Rev. Raphael Warnock (right) rallies with Jon Ossoff (left) at a joint campaign stop in DeKalb County in Georgia’s U.S. Senate races on Oct. 3, 2020. (Photo by Beau Evans)
Two Democratic candidates running for U.S. Senate seats from Georgia gained the backing of presidential nominee Joe Biden on Monday, a day before the former vice president is set to visit the state ahead of the Nov. 3 election.
The endorsements for Rev. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff come as both face increased attacks from Republican opponents in their respective Senate races amid a blitz of television and social-media ads down the home stretch before Election Day.
Warnock, who is the senior pastor of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, is running with about 20 other candidates to unseat U.S. Sen. Kelly Loeffler, a Republican and Atlanta businesswoman appointed to fill retired U.S. Sen. Johnny Isakson’s seat in January.
He has the double challenge of fending off fierce attacks from another Republican, U.S. Rep. Doug Collins, R-Gainesville, who is angling to top Loeffler in votes on Nov. 3 and make an expected runoff in January against Warnock.
Ossoff, who owns an investigative journalism company, is taking on U.S. Sen. David Perdue in a heated race that has shown the two campaigns neck-and-neck in the polls. Tens of millions of dollars have been poured into both Ossoff and Warnock’s campaigns as well as their opponents.
Biden’s endorsement particularly of Warnock highlighted tension in the race between Loeffler and Collins, neither of which have received the endorsement of their party’s top leader, President Donald Trump. The president has signaled he likely won’t endorse either Republican until one advances to the runoff.
In statements sent Monday, Biden praised Warnock and Ossoff for their campaigns’ focus on health care, voting rights and workers’ rights.
“We need [Warnock] in the Senate to keep up that fight and help push our country forward to restore the soul of this nation,” Biden said of Warnock.
“I know Jon will put [his] passion to work for all Georgians, fighting for Georgia’s working families, not the powerful,” Biden said of Ossoff.
More than 2.8 million Georgians have cast ballots so far in the upcoming general and special elections. Early voting lasts through Friday.
The line stretched around the block at South Cobb Regional Library in Mableton where voters waited in line for hours to cast ballots on the first day of early voting in the Nov. 3 general election on Oct. 12, 2020. (Photo by Beau Evans)
With the Nov. 3 elections just around the corner, Georgians are already heading to the polls in record-breaking numbers amid the dual challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic and the biggest test of the state’s new voting machines.
More than 2.4 million ballots had been cast by mail and in person during the early-voting period as of noon Friday, marking around one-third of Georgia’s roughly 7.5 million registered voters.
Georgians are facing one of the most consequential elections in their lifetimes with a presidential contest, both of Georgia’s U.S. Senate seats, congressional, state and local offices all on the ballot, while state Democratic leaders are vying to flip the Georgia House for the first time since 2005.
Concerns over the virus, recent instances of long lines and doubts over the election’s integrity have driven unprecedented numbers of voters to cast absentee ballots and take advantage of the three-week early-voting period that started last week and ends next Friday.
Nearly 900,000 absentee ballots had been cast by noon Friday, vastly more than the roughly 109,000 ballots cast at this point in the 2016 election. Add those numbers to the roughly 1.5 million in-person early votes logged so far and Georgia’s ballot count to date has exceeded this point in the 2016 election by 121%.
“We are working to make Georgia’s election system fair, voter-centric, smooth and uniform,” Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said at a recent news conference. “So far with the numbers, we are succeeding.”
Even so, thousands of voters in metro Atlanta and elsewhere in the state have endured hours-long waits in line at local polling places to vote early, echoing the lengthy queues Georgia saw in the June 9 primary elections and prompting worries over how voting for Election Day on Nov. 3 will fare.
And election officials have met with some technical issues involving the new machines including an overwhelmed check-in system that contributed to delays and a software glitch that wiped some candidates’ names from the ballot. Officials have said both issues were fixed.
County officials who manage the nuts-and-bolts of elections at the local level have pushed to staff up poll workers with adequate training in the new machines and implement sanitization practices amid the pandemic that aim to keep voters safe but have prolonged wait times.
In particular, delays have come as voters who requested absentee ballots but show up to vote in person must formally cancel their mail-in ballots before they can vote. That extra step has extended wait times in precincts across the state, according to local officials.
“That’s slowing things down a bit,” said Janine Eveler, director of the Cobb County Board of Elections and Registration.
Eveler, like other county election chiefs, will have help from a temporary rule allowing election officials to start opening and processing absentee ballots as of this week. Those ballots can’t be tabulated yet, but officials agree the head start should relieve some counting pressure on Election Day.
Raffensperger and other officials are also expecting the three weeks of early voting with such large turnout will give poll workers ample preparation in how to run the new machines before Nov. 3. Lack of know-how at some polling places was a major factor in long lines seen during the June 9 primaries, according to officials.
Installed statewide earlier this year, the new $104 million voting machines from Dominion Voting Systems drew intense scrutiny well before the COVID-19 pandemic set in, largely from voting-rights groups pushing for Georgia to adopt an all-paper ballot system instead of touchscreens.
A lawsuit brought to halt use of the new machines for the 2020 elections prompted a federal judge to require paper backups of voter registration information at polling places to be available if the check-in equipment experiences glitches.
Marilyn Marks, executive director of the Coalition for Good Governance that filed suit, is seeking the court’s intervention to require that certain precincts allow observers inside polling places so they can more closely monitor the machines’ performance for the rest of early voting and on Election Day.
“We think that in this next week, it’s going to be really important to try and gather evidence of what’s wrong,” Marks said in a recent interview. “We’re trying very hard to get in.”
Raffensperger has sought to assure quick technical assistance will be on hand for Election Day from the vendor Dominion as well as with backing from local companies that are helping provide tech support, donate plexiglass screens at polling places and purchase more absentee ballot drop-off boxes for counties.
With turnout expected to top 5 million voters, Raffensperger has called for more Georgians to cast ballots by mail or during early voting to help ease the bottleneck that could strain polling places on Election Day. So far, the state appears on track to have enough votes collected before Nov. 3 to make the upcoming election more manageable, Raffensperger said.
“That will be a manageable election,” Raffensperger said. “The more they vote early, the less there will be left on the playing field to show up on Election Day.”
Coin-operated machine supporters pressed state lawmakers Thursday to see the virtues of a new option to award gift cards as winnings instead of just lottery tickets, gasoline and in-store merchandise in Georgia convenience stores.
Store owners who contract with vendors to host the gaming machines are not allowed by law to reimburse winning players with cash, though industry representatives have acknowledged some stores and vendors flout that rule.
Gift cards pose a good option for players to collect on their winnings that would also drive up sales-tax revenues via purchases in places like gas stations or Walmart where the cards could be transacted, said Les Schneider, an attorney and lobbyist for the Georgia Amusement and Music Operators Association.
“The lottery gift card is something that is going to clear up a great number of problems,” Schneider said.
The lottery corporation has recently begun a pilot program to test out the gift card option in convenience stores, of which attorney David Jaffer said there are more than 6,600 in Georgia.
In all, convenience stores drum up more than $35 billion in sales annually and have faced stricter regulation of coin-operated machines since the lottery assumed oversight from the state Department of Revenue in 2013, said Jaffer, who represents convenience stores.
And though speakers at Thursday’s meeting disagreed on how best to tweak the rules for machines, there was consensus the gift cards potentially could spur even more revenues than the $91 million coin-operated machines raised last fiscal year for the HOPE scholarship and pre-kindergarten programs, which the lottery helps fund.
“We believe the [gift card] pilot will prove to be successful, and initiating the gift card will do more to clean up this industry than any of the other ideas we’ve seen or heard presented over the last few years,” said Angela Holland, president of the Georgia Association of Convenience Stores.
Lawmakers on the committee are tasked with drafting recommendations by December.
The line stretched around the block at South Cobb Regional Library in Mableton where voters waited in line for hours to cast ballots on the first day of early voting in the Nov. 3 general election on Oct. 12, 2020. (Photo by Beau Evans)
Georgians are turning out to vote in record-breaking numbers both by mail and at local polling places during the early voting period less than two weeks before the Nov. 3 election.
As of noon Wednesday, nearly 2 million people had voted in the hotly anticipated election that features a presidential contest, both of Georgia’s U.S. Senate seats, congressional, state and local offices all on the ballot.
Of those, more than 1.2 million had cast ballots in person during the three-week early voting period that started last Monday, marking a roughly 60% increase in the number of early voters compared to the same point in the 2016 election.
And to date, around 783,000 voters have cast absentee ballots amid the COVID-19 pandemic that has prompted many Georgians to avoid the lines and virus transmission risks involved in heading to the polls. By this time in the 2016 election, roughly 103,000 mail-in ballots had been cast.
“Notwithstanding the pandemic, voters in the Peach State can take advantage of no-excuse absentee ballot voting by mail or through a secure drop box, three weeks of early in-person voting or Election Day voting,” said Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.
With turnout still climbing, state and county election officials expect even more people to cast ballots next week in the days leading up to the election. Raffensperger said earlier this week turnout could top 2.5 million for early voting, with another 2 million voting on Election Day.
Georgia voters have already contended with hours-long waits in line outside many polling places since early voting began last week. Officials have urged voters to take advantage of an online portal to request absentee ballots and to mail them back as soon as possible.
As of Monday, Raffensperger said more than 1.6 million absentee ballots had been requested.
