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Marietta Chang W. Lee / The New York Times
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Alpharetta Chang W. Lee / The New York Times
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Marietta Chang W. Lee / The New York Times
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Atlanta Chang W. Lee / The New York Times
Most of the polls are now closed in Georgia and the results should start coming in around 7:30 pm ET. A small handful of seals received court-ordered extensions, ranging from one minute to 40 minutes, due to problems earlier in the day.
We expect votes to be counted a little faster than in November, because a new rule requires Georgia election officials to begin processing early ballots by mail at least one week before Election Day. This means that while officials were not allowed to count anything before the polls closed, they should have finished much of the work of opening envelopes, verifying signatures, etc.
Because of this, it is possible, but not guaranteed! – we will know who won tonight.
That said, be very careful when interpreting the first results. Because votes cast before Tuesday are expected to be disproportionately Democratic and votes cast on Election Day are expected to be disproportionately Republican, a candidate who appears to be significantly behind early in the evening could catch up at the end.
Also note that anyone in line before 7 pm has the right to vote, even if it takes them several more hours to get to the polls.
Jenny Catherall and
In an extremely tight race with national implications, all eyes turned to the ballot counting process in Georgia, where state officials told us they’re determined to get it right. While some voters echoed baseless claims of election fraud put forth by President Trump, others defended the integrity of the process.
Read an interview from 2020
Gabriel Sterling, a top Georgia election official, told reporters shortly before the polls were scheduled to close that the day had gone mostly smoothly, but that a handful of precincts would stay open past 7 p.m. because of problems earlier in the day.
As of when Mr. Sterling appeared around 6:15 p.m. Eastern, courts had ordered extended hours at six polling locations and were considering requests for extensions at four other locations. These sorts of orders are not unusual, and most of the extensions are very short: In Columbia County, for instance, Precinct 65 will be open until 7:01 p.m. instead of 7, and Precinct 34 will be open until 7:04.
A few of the extensions are longer, though. The Old Chatham County Courthouse in Savannah will be open until 7:33, Beach High School in Savannah will be open until 7:35, and the Eldorado precinct in Tift County will be open until 7:40.
Ware County could also request an extension because of an accident that shut down the main road to one polling place.
Mr. Sterling added that Georgia’s voter information website, where people can do things like look up their polling place or check on the status of their absentee ballot, had been slowed earlier in the day when a single IP address began sending several requests per second. He said officials had responded by blocking the IP address, which was domestic.
61 percent of voters surveyed in Georgia report that they believe Joe Biden was legitimately elected president, according to new A.P. survey results.
New A.P. voter surveys in Georgia show that 32 percent of those voting identify as African-American or Black, a number that indicates high turnout in that demographic group.
New A.P. voter surveys in Georgia: 59 percent of voters say they are “very” or “somewhat” confident that ineligible votes were not allowed during the presidential election.
Kelly Loeffler was appointed by Georgia’s governor to the Senate in 2019. Another appointed senator, Martha McSally of Arizona, lost in November when she had to face voters.
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Expect early returns to show a G.O.P. edge, with conservative counties likely to report results faster. Democratic counties, including suburban Atlanta, typically take more time.
The winners of Georgia’s dual Senate runoff elections may not be known for days, but the battle is already one for the record books — with the November election and the January runoffs combining to occupy the top two slots on the list of most expensive legislative races in history.
All told, donors big and small have shelled out about $830 million to independent expenditure groups, party committees and the candidates themselves, according to an analysis of federal elections data and a summary compiled by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.
Much of that cash, more than $490 million in the last two months of the runoffs, has been spent on television, digital and radio advertising, according to data from AdImpact, a media-tracking firm.
The race between David Perdue, a Republican whose Senate term ended over the weekend, and his Democratic challenger, Jon Ossoff, is the most expensive ever, drawing about $470 million when the general election and the runoff are combined.
The battle between Senator Kelly Loeffler, a Republican, and the Rev. Raphael Warnock, a Democrat, is a close second-place finisher, with a $362 million price tag as of mid-December, when the most recent Federal Election Commission filings were made. These numbers could rise steeply when final tallies are released after the election.
A staggering 215 outside groups contributed to the Perdue-Ossoff race, contributing $271 million in all, with Mr. Ossoff out-raising Mr. Perdue by about $50 million. More than a hundred groups have shelled out a combined $171 million in the Loeffler-Warnock race, with Mr. Warnock enjoying a $28 million edge in fund-raising, according to the Center for Responsive Politics analysis.
The blowout numbers do not merely reflect the stakes of the Georgia race, or the expensive ad rates in the Atlanta media market: They also reflect a financial arms race focused on the Senate in which records were shattered in many states.
In fact, nine of the 10 most expensive Senate campaigns in the country’s history took place in 2020, the center found.
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Audra Melton for The New York Times
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Audra Melton for The New York Times
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Audra Melton for The New York Times
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Audra Melton for The New York Times
LaTosha Brown and Cliff Albright, co-founders of the grass-roots group Black Voters Matter, drove what they call “The Blackest bus in America” to Georgia communities with historically low voter turnout on Tuesday, including a stop in Lee Park in Jonesboro.
The two have spent years preaching the importance of local elections and engagement all over the South. “So much of what we do is about affirming Black people and pushing the concept of power, that it is something we can have and deserve,” Ms. Brown told The New York Times Magazine in a recent article. “We are rightful participants in this democracy.”
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About 3.1 million people voted early, and that vote appeared to tilt Democratic. If another million people cast ballots today, Republicans believe they are likely to win.
President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Tuesday urged Georgians to vote and expressed continued optimism about unifying the nation, even as some Republicans in Congress push to overturn his election.
In an interview on WVEE-FM, an Atlanta radio station, Mr. Biden made a case for the importance of electing the Democratic candidates, Jon Ossoff and the Rev. Raphael Warnock, in the runoff elections on Tuesday for Georgia’s Senate seats.
“I need their votes in the Senate,” Mr. Biden said.
He said he was “feeling really optimistic about today,” and he made a simple request to Georgia residents: “Vote, vote, vote.”
Mr. Biden also made a pitch for Mr. Ossoff and Mr. Warnock in an interview with WFXE-FM in Columbus, Ga., declaring, “So much is at stake.”
The president-elect spoke a day after traveling to Atlanta for a drive-in rally with the two Democratic candidates. If both candidates win, their party will gain control of the Senate, with Vice President-elect Kamala Harris as a tiebreaking vote.
In the WVEE interview, Mr. Biden said their election would allow for the passage of $2,000 stimulus checks, and he suggested that the two Democrats could help provide support for his administration’s efforts to distribute the Covid-19 vaccine.
Mr. Biden said he envisioned establishing “thousands of federally run and federally supported community vaccination centers of various sizes across the country” in locations like high school gyms and N.F.L. stadiums.
And Mr. Biden, who ran for president with a message of bringing the country together and working with both parties, stuck to that theme despite plans among some Republicans in Congress to object to certifying the Electoral College results on Wednesday.
“There are enough really decent Republicans — you’re seeing them step up now in the United States Senate — who don’t want to be part of this Trump Republican Party,” Mr. Biden said, citing Senator Mitt Romney of Utah as one example. “There’s a whole bunch of them.”
Early voting returns worried some Republicans, who were not happy with the low turnout in conservative Northwest Georgia. They hope Trump’s rally there motivated supporters.
At age 33, Jon Ossoff would be just three years over the minimum age for being a U.S. senator if he is elected in today’s runoff. His opponent, David Perdue, is 71.
One thing to note: David Perdue is actually former Senator David Perdue. His term expired and the rest of the new Congress was sworn in on Sunday.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger shot down President Trump’s suggestion Tuesday that a voting machine snafu in a conservative county near Augusta had compromised Republican votes in the Senate runoff elections.
“Reports are coming out of the 12th Congressional District of Georgia that Dominion Machines are not working in certain Republican Strongholds for over an hour,” Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter on Tuesday afternoon, citing a report of glitches first reported by Representative Rick Allen, a Republican who represents the polling places in question.
“Ballots are being left in lock boxes, hopefully they count them,” added Mr. Trump.
Mr. Raffensperger shot back in his midday status report, saying that “a small number” of keys used to start voting machines had not been programmed properly and “a few” cards used by poll workers to activate touch-screen machines also had programming issues.
All of the issues “were resolved by 10 a.m.,” he wrote. “At no point did voting stop as voters continued casting ballots on emergency ballots, in accordance with the procedures set out by Georgia law.”
On Saturday, Mr. Trump called Mr. Raffensperger and said, “I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have,” according to a recording of the call made by the secretary’s staff.
The singling out of Dominion by name in Mr. Trump’s tweet was noteworthy: The president has seized on conspiracy theories that the company switched votes to President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. in November, a false claim that has prompted the voting machine manufacturer to threaten legal action against one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers.
When Georgia’s Senate runoff polls close tonight, elections officials will begin reporting three sets of ballots: 2.1 million votes cast in person during early voting; 1 million votes cast by mail; and those cast at precincts on Tuesday — a figure that officials estimate could be anywhere between 500,000 and 800,000.
It is possible, though far from certain, that the Senate races could be called late Tuesday or early Wednesday. While it took more than a week for Georgia to be called for President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr., a faster count is expected during these runoffs.
Still, there will be little consistency to how Georgia’s 159 counties report their results. Some will post all of their early in-person votes, which have already been tabulated by voting machines, shortly after polling places close at 7 p.m.
The mail ballots are likely to be counted more slowly. Most of these ballots have already been processed, with envelope signatures and addresses verified. But the ballots have not been run through vote-counting machines.
Some counties will be faster than others to report their results. Fulton County, which is the state’s most populous county and includes the city of Atlanta, has a well-earned reputation for being slow at reporting vote totals. The county is already behind the state average in processing mailed-in ballots.
Statewide, 74 percent of mail ballots have been processed, but Fulton County, a Democratic stronghold, has processed just 66 percent of its ballots, according to the United States Election Project.
In neighboring Cobb and Gwinnett Counties, suburbs that swung hard to President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. in November, officials have processed 82 percent and 76 percent of their mail ballots — an indication that those counties will report results earlier in the night.
Other counties expected to be slow in reporting results include Henry County, a suburb south of Atlanta that has processed 57 percent of its mail ballots; Clayton and Forsythe counties, in metropolitan Atlanta; Chatham County, which includes Savannah; and Houston County, just south of Macon.
One big unknown remains the size of Georgia’s election day turnout. Though polls close at 7 p.m., voters in line at that time will be allowed to vote if they remain in line, which could delay results in some counties.
The Georgia secretary of state’s office, which said Tuesday afternoon that the average statewide wait time was one minute, will not report any turnout numbers until after the polls close. Officials with the Senate campaigns, political parties and outside groups working in the state had anecdotal data that showed a steady but not overwhelming turnout.
If Senator Kelly Loeffler wins today, she will have to run again in two years. She is filling out the unexpired term of Senator Johnny Isakson, who retired.
Tyler Perry, whose Madea franchise has made him among the wealthiest stars in Hollywood, hopped a flight from Wyoming to Georgia late Monday to vote in person after failing to receive an absentee ballot.
“All right, my absentee ballot never came, so I just left voting in person, so y’all get out and vote, get out and vote, get out and vote,” Mr. Perry said while sitting in his car outside an unidentified polling place in a selfie video posted on Twitter on Tuesday afternoon.
On Monday, Mr. Perry — who owns houses in California, Wyoming and the Bahamas but maintains his main residence in the Atlanta area, where he built a 330-acre studio — expressed concern that he would not get a chance to cast his votes in the runoff.
“Is anyone else having this problem? I ordered my absentee ballot on December 2nd. I’m told it was mailed on the 4th. I still don’t have it!” he informed his 6.4 million Twitter followers.
A back and forth with Stacey Abrams, a voting rights activist who ran unsuccessfully for governor in 2018, ensued.
“Requested a ballot but haven’t received it? Vote in person on Election Day! Just tell the person at the check-in table that you wish to cancel your ballot & vote in person,” she responded.
“Hey @staceyabrams, I flew home because I didn’t get it. I will be there early in the morning. Too important to miss. Too important to miss!” he tweeted back.
Mr. Perry had described himself as nonpartisan, but he endorsed Joseph R. Biden Jr. in 2020, suggesting that he felt the need to oust President Trump for the sake of his 5-year-old son.
Another contest is underway — between reality and fantasy, as Trump seeks to sow doubts about Georgia’s election system. State officials are rebutting his charges in real time.
It’s a political cliché, but this election is all about turnout now. Democrats appeared to get the edge in early voting. Can Republicans capture enough votes on election day?
Three of Georgia’s four candidates for the Senate — Jon Ossoff, Kelly Loeffler and the Rev. Raphael Warnock — made public appearances on Tuesday. The fourth, David Perdue, remained under quarantine after a member of his campaign staff tested positive for Covid-19 last week.
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Kelly Loeffler Elijah Nouvelage/Reuters
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Rev. Raphael Warnock Lynsey Weatherspoon for The New York Times
In the days after the Nov. 3 election, Georgia was one of several states where the vote count seemed to progress agonizingly slowly. Then came a recount. Ten days passed before the state was called for President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr., and even after that, there was another recount — long past the point when there was any chance of a different result.
But it’s unlikely that it will take as long to count the votes in the two runoff elections that will determine control of the Senate, which are arriving at the finish line on Tuesday. It’s even possible — but certainly not guaranteed — that we’ll know who won on Tuesday night, or very early Wednesday.
Two factors work in favor of a faster count this time around. First, fewer races are on the ballot, which means less work for election officials. Second, after the general election, the Georgia State Election Board enacted a rule requiring counties to begin processing early and absentee ballots at least a week before future elections.
Officials can’t actually count the ballots until the polls close, but they can do all the time-consuming prep work. That means votes cast before election day — more than three million, according to Gabriel Sterling, a top state election official — should already be compiled, and pretty much all officials will need to do Tuesday night is hit “tabulate.”
The new rule allows counties “to essentially do everything except hit the button to print off the total,” said David Worley, the sole Democratic member of the State Election Board.
If all goes smoothly, Mr. Worley said, “I would think we would have a pretty good idea” who won by 1 a.m. Wednesday.
The biggest questions are whether all will, in fact, go smoothly, and just how close the races will be. In an extremely tight race, results could be delayed several days while late-arriving ballots come in.
Voting is going smoothly in Georgia today, with election protection lawyers reporting no major problems with voting machines or extended waits at polling places.
“We’ve had minor issues,” said Helen Butler, executive director of the Georgia Coalition for the People’s Agenda, a voter education organization. “For the most part it’s going quite well in Georgia.”
The record number of voters who cast ballots early, either by mail or in person, helped control crowding at polling places. Nearly 3.1 million Georgians cast their ballots before Election Day, roughly 40 percent of all the registered voters in the state, according to data compiled by the University of Florida’s U.S. Elections Project.
The longest lines reported to election protection hotlines were around 30 minutes, according to voter protection lawyers. Kristen Clarke, executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said the most common complaint reported to a hotline run by her organization was that some voters failed to receive mail ballots before the Election Day deadline.
“Many voters across the state availed themselves of the opportunity to participate in early voting,” said Ms. Clarke. “We are not surprised that we are not seeing poll sites flooded with large overwhelming numbers of voters today.”
Getting the vote during a pandemic is tricky, but musicians looking to make a difference have found ways to be creative.
In November, a group called Joy to the Polls hosted pop-up concerts at polling places in competitive states, bringing professional musicians to perform for voters while they waited in line. And Joy to the Polls has been keeping busy during the early voting period in Georgia’s runoff elections, putting on surprise concerts at polling places across the state and especially in Atlanta, today’s unofficial hip-hop capital.
And Joy to the Polls isn’t the only group bringing artists together to try to drive engagement. Several have become remotely involved, with no less than three separate groups of musicians creating collaborative Zoom-style renditions of Hoagy Carmichael and Stuart Gorrell’s classic song, “Georgia on My Mind.”
Lin-Manuel Miranda, the actor and playwright of “Hamilton” fame, brought together several Broadway stars under the moniker Rock the Runoff to create a moving and evangelical interpretation of the song. In collaboration with the Biden campaign, Sunny Jain and several other musicians with South Asian roots created their own version of the song, with the lyrics sung in Hindi. The explicit goal was to get voters in South Asia and America to support the Democratic Senate candidates.
And Lift Every Vote 2020, a group that has worked to register young, non-white voters across the state before the second round, assembled a team of top-notch jazz musicians to record a relaxed, easy-going version of melody.
NORCROSS, Ga. – The wind didn’t help when Rosie Ramirez tried to take a selfie with a “Vote Here” banner waving behind her. The peach tag on her sweater declared that she had cast her vote.
“It is my country!” Ms. Ramírez said. “I came here to express my voice!”
The issue that concerned him most was medical care. Mrs. Ramírez needs a liver transplant. “It is very, very expensive,” he said. “I need good insurance.”
She said she sometimes agreed with President Trump, but was enthusiastic about his support for Democratic Senate candidates, particularly Jon Ossoff, whom she considered young and vigorous. “I think it is the best option,” he said.
Ms. Ramírez also believed that Democrats could strike a better tone. “We need unity in the country,” he said.
Lulu Miles agreed on the importance of health care in her vote. He retired after working for a hospital for 42 years, and the cost of insurance premiums was surprisingly high.
She also supported Democrats, she said, because they could level the playing field. “Treat everyone the same,” Miles said. “Equal pay, equal employment.”
The past four years have been turbulent and full of negatives for many in the country, he said. But maybe, he said, there was a silver lining: “Maybe something good will come out of it.”
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