Fulton still counting 11,000 paper ballots

Georgians may know Thursday morning whether Republican U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss wins re-election or faces a runoff against Democratic challenger Jim Martin.

Fulton County officials said late Wednesday that they expect to finish counting some 30,000 paper absentee ballots by early morning.

Chambliss would be the winner if he gets 50 percent of the vote plus one. Short of that, the race goes to a runoff Dec. 2 — though the state cannot officially call a runoff before next week, when the votes are certified.

Preliminary numbers provided by the Secretary of State’s Office Wednesday showed that about 3.8 million people voted in this election, a turnout rate of 66.9 percent. That was 0.6 percentage points higher than the turnout in the 2004 presidential election, the numbers showed.

Late Wednesday, Fulton was still counting about 11,000 of some 30,000 paper absentee ballots. It was the only county with numerous ballots outstanding, said Matt Carrothers, a spokesman for Secretary of State Karen Handel’s office.

About 90 Fulton elections employees and staff volunteers spent the day at a west Atlanta loading dock counting absentee ballots at long lines of tables, feeding the paper ballots into optical scanners that spit them out on the other side.

They had started counting some 40,000 absentee ballots after polls closed Tuesday but stopped after 2 a.m. because workers were exhausted.

As of late Wednesday, there were still 123 precincts yet to report statewide. Carrothers said those precincts reflect provisional ballots and votes from military personnel or U.S. citizens who live overseas that must still be counted.

While one exit poll of voters, the Edison/Mitofsky exit poll, suggested that turnout in the state might have been as much as 400,000 votes higher, Carrothers said the number of votes still uncounted was far fewer. But he could not say precisely how many were cast.

In a year in which Georgia added some 803,795 new voters to the rolls, about 17.3 percent more Georgians cast ballots this year than did in 2004, according to the Secretary of State’s data. Nearly 567,000 more voted for president this year than in 2004.

Michael McDonald of George Mason University estimated that nationally, turnout would reach 64.1 percent, the highest since 65.7 percent of voters cast ballots for president in 1908.

In Clayton County, turnout was reported to be 67 percent this year, compared to 62.8 percent in 2004. The reason? “It was an historic election,” said Annie Bright, Clayton’s director of elections.

In Cobb County, reported turnout was 71.6 percent, compared to 70.9 percent in 2004.

Early voting drew huge crowds this year. About 2 million people, or more than 50 percent of those who voted this year did so before Election Day, officials said. That early turnout helped Election Day voting go smoothly.

Maybe too smoothly, some suggested.

It’s possible the long four- to six-hour lines many voters experienced during advance voting scared some people away from the polls on Tuesday, some county officials said.

Both Fulton and Gwinnett counties said they saw an early push of voters on Election Day, but lunchtime and after-work crowds never materialized.

“Could it be that people were afraid of the long lines they saw?” said Gwinnett County spokesman Joe Sorenson. “We definitely expected the polls to be full all day long.”

Gwinnett had anticipated an 88 percent turnout of “active” registered voters. The number of active registered voters — those who have voted in recent elections — is smaller than the total number of registered voters.

Ultimately, Gwinnett’s turnout was reported at 68.8 percent of total registered voters.

Gwinnett isn’t sure exactly how turnout compares to its expectations or to past turnout because its assumptions were based on different numbers for the two years.

“I suspect it actually was down from 2004,” county spokesman Joe Sorenson said. “It looks flat or that it went down.”

Mark Henderson, spokesman for Fulton County’s election office, expressed surprise at Fulton’s total turnout Wednesday, which was hovering around 60 percent.

He thinks many people who were going to vote did so early and others may have stayed away, fearing long Election Day lines. Instead, lines were often nonexistent Tuesday.

“My fiancee went to vote at 6:50 [p.m.] and there was no one voting,” he said.

— Staff writers Marcus K. Garner, Alan Judd, Heather Vogell, John Perry and Jeremy Redmon contributed to this article.