What’s Happening with Mail-In Voting in Georgia?

• MIT and Stanford researchers take a deep dive into Georgia’s mail in ballot data to understand trends in requests, returns, and demographics.*
• As of October 31, nearly 1.78 million mail ballots have been requested, compared to 241,519 in 2016 — a 7x increase.
• 288,430 of these mail ballot requests have been canceled (usually by the voters themselves because they decided to vote early in person instead, or due to other administrative issues including whether they moved, or the ballot was destroyed).
• So far, 71.5% of requested ballots have already been returned for counting (1,266,056 total); 505,159 ballots are still outstanding.
• White voters make up a majority of mail ballot requests (52%), followed by requests from Black voters (32%) and the remaining (16%) from voters of other races; the rates of mail ballot return have been largely equal among races.
• During the week of October 18 alone, 48,251 mail ballots were requested and 316,325 had been returned.
• Rejections of mail ballots remain low with only 1,587 (<1%) having been rejected so far, nearly all due to signature issues — either missing (70%) or invalid (30%). This is likely because the state has yet to formally reject ballots or has not started reporting this in the absentee file.

With the election nearly upon us, researchers from the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project analyzed the mail voting trends across the State of Georgia.

As of this past week, nearly 1.78 million mail ballots had been requested across Georgia — this number is a 7x increase since 2016. Of these, 288,430 requests have been canceled (usually by the voters themselves because they decided to vote early in person instead, or due to other administrative issues including whether they moved, or the ballot was destroyed).

Of the 1.78 million requests, roughly 71.5% of mail ballots had been returned for counting, with 505,159 ballots remaining to be returned. Overall, the rejection rate of mail ballots remains low with only 1587(<1%) having been rejected so far. These rejections have been nearly all due to signature issues — either missing (70%) or invalid (30%). The rejection number is likely so low because the state has yet to formally reject ballots or has not started reporting it in the absentee file.