Election officials think the early vote in many battleground states has been so robust that on Election Day itself, polling places could be a “ghost town,” The Associated Press reported Friday evening.
In Georgia alone, according to the report, more than 4 million votes could end up being cast before Tuesday, through a combination of mail-in ballots and early in-person voting. To put that into perspective, the total vote in Georgia in 2020 from all combined methods was less than 5 million .
” Early vote records have been shattered not only in Georgia and other presidential battlegrounds such as North Carolina but even in states without major contests on the ballot like New Jersey and Louisiana,” said the report. Part of the reason for the shift is that “During the pandemic in 2020, then-President Donald Trump railed against early voting and mail voting, claiming they were part of a plot to steal the election from him. In 2022, after falsely blaming his 2020 loss on early voting, he kept at it” — but this time, Trump and the GOP have made an aggressive push for people to vote early…