Early voting and absentee ballots in Georgia that are returned over the weekend will be handled no later than 8 p.m. local time on Election Day, according to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.
Additionally, all votes cast on Election Day will be counted by the end of the night, Raffensperger said in an interview with CNN.
Georgia is one of a handful of states where Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump face a tight contest.
With less than a week left until election night, all eyes are on the battleground states, where razor-thin election polling suggests that it could take more time to determine a clear winner in some states if it comes down to just a small number of votes.
Voters should not expect to know the winner of a state until all ballots are counted. Furthermore, several states prohibit officials from processing and counting mail-in ballots until Election Day.
Georgia started processing mail-in ballots on Oct. 21.
According to Raffensperger, Georgia has been preparing for the 2024 election over the past four years by adding more early voting days and investing in infrastructure. The state now holds 17 days of early voting.
Meanwhile, the period to request an absentee ballot in Georgia has closed. For those voters who missed the deadline, they must vote early in-person or on election day.
Voters in the Peach State on Tuesday broke the three million mark for in-person early voting turnout.
“Georgia voters know we’ve made it easy to cast a ballot. It’s really that simple,” Raffensperger wrote in a statement.
According to the latest data from FiveThirtyEight, Trump leads Harris in Georgia, 48.7 percent to 46.9 percent.
Bipartisan Cook Political Report has rated Georgia a “toss-up” in the 2024 presidential race.
“This is a tight election,” Gabriel Sterling, chief operations officer, told reporters during a Wednesday press conference. “Anybody telling you it’s going to be a blowout or another has some secret magic ball the rest of us don’t know about. It’s going to be a close election, here, it’s going to be a close election in Pennsylvania, it’s going be a close election in Michigan, and in Wisconsin, in Nevada, in Arizona, and in North Carolina.”
Given the record number of votes already cast, Election Day in Georgia may be a “ghost town,” according to Sterling.
Georgia played a significant role in the 2020 presidential election. Biden became the first Democratic presidential candidate to win the state since Bill Clinton in 1992. But Biden won over Trump by only 0.2 percent, or 11,779 votes. It was the narrowest margin of victory in the country that year, according to election tracker 270towin.
The latest turnout numbers through October 29 provided by the secretary of state show more than 3.2 million voters have already cast ballots. Of those already cast, 3,009,204 Georgia residents voted early in-person while 195,462 voters turned in absentee ballots.
Georgia holds 16 electoral votes. It takes 270 electoral votes to win the 2024 presidential election.
Election Day is Tuesday, Oct. 5