Georgia’s early voting lines getting longer

Despite the rain Friday, they still came, willing to wait in line an hour to vote even though the pressure of Election Day is more than two weeks away.

“Everybody and his brother is here,” said Mary Francis Weeks with the DeKalb County elections office. “This is the longest line we’ve had.”

Gwinnett County assistant office director Lynn Hart said people were waiting 45 minutes to more than an hour. “It’s a lot today, which is surprising because of the rain,” Hart said.

Fulton County’s three sites have been averaging a total of 3,000 a day, but they “have slowly increased every day and they continue to increase,” spokesman Mark Henderson said.

In the metro Atlanta area, the wait to vote early has been about an hour. Cobb County spokesman Robert Quigley said the slower times, so far, have been early in the morning and between 3 p.m. and 5 p.m. but the wait will still be at least an hour.

Election officials in the other metro counties say there is really no slow time to come. People are usually lined up outside the offices before they open and the flow is steady through out the day.

Statewide, almost 635,800 had voted by the end of Thursday, most of them in person, according to the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office. Almost 36 percent of those voting in advance by mail or in person are African-American.

The counts reported by the state and local election offices show the pace is picking up. Each day, there are more than the day before.

Voting statewide as of Thursday:

• Total statewide: 635,798 (13 percent of registered voters)
• Thursday: 50,400
• Wednesday: 44,641
• Tuesday: 41,175
• Monday: 30,954

Total turnout by county

• Cobb: 34,638
• DeKalb: 63,788
• Fulton: 45,681
• Gwinnett: 34,638

See ajc.com/election for poll locations and more information about early voting.