Mail voting plummets in Georgia even as early voting turnout shatters records

The number of people who have returned their Georgia midterm ballots through the mail has sharply declined compared with the same period during the 2022 midterms, even as the state breaks early voting turnout records.

More than 69,000 mail ballots were accepted by election officials through Thursday afternoon, a more than 50% decline from the same period in 2022. It comes after President Donald Trump and his allies have cast doubts about mail ballots during Trump’s second term.

Trump has long criticized mail voting, falsely claiming such ballots are “corrupt,” even as he has used the voting method himself. In Georgia, those claims could be having an effect on how people cast ballots.

In September, the U.S. Supreme Court blocked Trump’s plan to restrict access to mail ballots for the midterms. The legal fight wound through the courts mere weeks before mail ballots in Georgia were to be sent out.

Election officials and voting rights groups said there simply wasn’t time to overhaul the system. They said the new plan went beyond the federal government’s authority and would cause mistakes, delays and confusion. Opponents also warned it threatened to disenfranchise voters.

While concerns about the political rhetoric surrounding mail-in balloting could be having an effect, Gowri Ramachandran, director of the elections and government program at the left-leaning Brennan Center for Justice, said another factor driving the dip could be a natural drift back to pre-pandemic voting trends after mail voting surged in 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Michael McDonald, a political science professor at the University of Florida who studies voting and elections, echoed that many factors could contribute to the decline.

In 2021, the Republican-controlled General Assembly passed a sweeping law that made it harder to cast an absentee ballot. Parts of the law limit ballot drop boxes and require different forms of identification for absentee voting.

This year’s drop in mail voting comes as a sizable chunk of Georgians have expressed unease about how the midterms will be conducted.

The latest Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll found nearly one in four likely Georgia voters are not confident that the midterms will be conducted fairly. The mistrust is bipartisan, but Republicans’ faith in elections has fallen since April, the last time voters were polled by the University of Georgia’s School of Public and International Affairs for the AJC.

About 24% of GOP voters lacked confidence in the election, an increase from 21% in April. Still, the shift is just within the poll’s 3.1% margin of error. Democrats’ lack of confidence hovered around where it was in April — 26%.

Under the U.S. Constitution, elections are administered by states, not the federal government. It doesn’t grant any explicit power to the president or the executive branch. During his second term, Trump has attempted to change how elections are run and insert more federal control over elections. However, most efforts have been blocked by federal courts.

For years, the president has cast doubt on elections and continues to falsely claim the 2020 vote was stolen from him, despite court cases, investigations and studies finding no evidence of widespread fraud.

“I also won the election in Georgia,” the president said at a Dalton rally last week. “We won it by a lot, if you remember. What a mess that was. And you see what happened in Fulton County with the ballots. … What a crooked deal that was.”

FBI agents in January seized more than 650 boxes of ballots and other election materials from Fulton County’s 2020 election as part of a criminal investigation. Months later, the administration has yet to publicly reveal evidence of wrongdoing.

That rhetoric and the administration’s actions haven’t moved the electorate’s lack of trust much since April.

Still, for some voters, the administration’s actions have taken a toll on their confidence in the upcoming midterms. Josiah Williams, a 42-year-old carpenter from Athens, said that he’s more concerned about this year’s midterms than other recent elections.

“I think the reason is that I’ve never seen this level of corruption,” said Williams, who considers himself an independent. “I’ve never seen this level of disregard for order that the Trump administration has shown.”

Still, three in four likely Republican voters are confident in the upcoming midterms. And about 72% of likely Democratic voters said they had confidence in the upcoming midterms, offering another window into the mood of voters headed into November.

“There might be something that happens,” said Sean Cooper, a 51-year-old from Perry. “I just have to put my faith and trust that the right people are going to be doing the right things.”

Linda Adcock, a 55-year-old from Jackson, said she’s confident because of Georgia’s voter ID requirements.