ATLANTA, Georgia — Georgia's advance voting period closed on Friday, October 30, with the final count approaching three million ballots — a record for midterm advance voting in the state — according to the Georgia News Network, with some county numbers still trickling in. The Wall Street Journal's reporting put the state's pre-Election Day total at about 2.8 million ballots. The final figure updates, and roughly doubles, the interim count of 1.78 million that Awaaz Punjab reported during the final week of advance voting: Georgians kept voting through the last days in numbers the state has never recorded in a midterm.

Source: Georgia News Network via WGTJ Radio

The striking detail is when the record fell. It did not need Friday. By 1:35 p.m. on Thursday, October 29, Georgia's Secretary of State's office had already counted 2,294,275 people voting early in person — above the entire in-person early total of the 2022 midterms, 2,289,951, with a full day of advance voting still remaining. Another 108,251 absentee ballots had been accepted by that point. Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said on Thursday, as the in-person record broke, that “Georgians continue to head to the polls in record numbers because they trust the system.”

Source: Georgia Secretary of State figures via The American Quorum

Where turnout ran highest — and lowest

Turnout was highest in north and central Georgia, the Georgia News Network reported. Towns County, in the mountains along the North Carolina line, led the entire state with a 48.3 percent turnout rate. At the other end, Chattahoochee County, on the Alabama line near Columbus, brought up the rear at 12.4 percent. That spread — a near four-to-one gap between the most and least engaged counties — is the local story inside the state record: the surge was real, but it was not evenly shared, and campaigns heading into Tuesday will be working hardest where advance voting left the most Election Day voters still to chase.

The composition of the early electorate also stood out. In Georgia, where early in-person voting broke the state's midterm record on Thursday, women accounted for 56 percent of ballots cast by that day, compared with 44 percent for men, according to the Election Lab-based reporting of the record. Party registration is not recorded for Georgia voters the way it is in states such as Florida or North Carolina, so there is no official partisan split of these ballots — and, as election officials repeat with every release, a ballot cast early says nothing about which candidate it was cast for. Ballots are not tallied by candidate before Election Day.

A record count is not the same as a record rate

The Secretary of State's own release carried the caution that makes this story more than a headline number. While the absolute in-person count broke the 2022 record on Thursday, the same release said overall participation, including mailed ballots, remained on pace with 2022 as a percentage of active voters. Both statements can be true at once: Georgia has more registered and active voters than it did four years ago, so a record number of ballots can still equal a similar share of the electorate. What the record unambiguously shows is operational scale — more Georgians than ever before in a midterm chose to vote before Election Day — not, by itself, a prediction of final turnout or of any result.

The final campaign weekend

The record advance vote frames a final weekend in which both parties are campaigning on a partly-decided electorate: millions of Georgia ballots are already locked in, and Tuesday's vote will be cast by the remainder. FOX 5's Georgia Gang, reviewing the historic early turnout, noted Republican gubernatorial nominee Rick Jackson and Democratic nominee Keisha Lance Bottoms making their final statewide campaign pushes, alongside the congressional races that will help decide control of Congress in Washington. Nationally, Georgia is one piece of the largest midterm advance vote ever recorded — more than 51.3 million ballots nationwide by Saturday — a story Awaaz Punjab has been tracking state by state.

Source: The Conclave — early voting record reporting

The national picture — early voting passing 51.3 million and beating the whole 2022 early vote before Election Day — is here: Early voting passes 51.3 million nationwide

What happens next is procedural and fast. Counties will finish reporting the last advance numbers trickling in over the weekend, giving Georgia its exact record total; then, on Tuesday, precinct voting runs from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., and the advance ballots are counted with the Election Day vote after polls close. For Georgia's Punjabi community — families concentrated around metro Atlanta suburbs such as Alpharetta, Cumming and Decatur, and truckers who run the I-75, I-85 and I-20 corridors through the state — the immediate point is the deadline change: the early sites many voters used in October are closed, Tuesday's assigned precinct is the only place to vote, and anyone still holding an absentee ballot should follow the county's return instructions rather than assume it can be dropped at any polling place.