Just more than 70 percent of the active voters in Oconee County cast a ballot by the end of the final day of early voting on Friday.
That figure includes the 21,272 voters who cast a ballot in-person, the 1,446 who returned an absentee ballot, and the single person who voted provisionally but whose ballot has now been accepted, for a total of 22,719 returned ballots.
As a point of reference, final turnout in the 2020 presidential election in Oconee County was 84.5 percent. It was 85.1 in 2016 and 80.0 in 2012.
The county now has 32,193 voters classified as active.
At the end of the day on Friday, only 9,474 of those active voters had not cast a ballot, with 312 of them having been issued an absentee ballot that has not yet been returned.
Election day voting runs from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. at the county’s eight precinct voting places on Tuesday, and those voting by absentee ballot must return that ballot by 7 p.m. on that date.
Roughly 2,075 inactive voters also are eligible to vote if they show up at the voting locations and can establish that the address at which they are registered is their legal address.
Oconee County, with a turnout rate at the end of the day on Friday of 70.6 percent, follows only Towns County on the North Carolina border among the state’s 159 counties in rate of turnout. Towns, with only 10,720 active voters, had a turnout rate on Friday of 72.1 percent.
Strong Finish
A total of 1,581 persons cast a ballot in-person at the county’s Administrative Building just north of Watkinsville on Friday, four votes short of the number that cast ballots in-person in the first day of early voting on Oct. 15.
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Early voting peaked at 1,642 on Oct. 18, the first Friday in the three weeks of early in-person voting, and never fell below 1,000 on any of the 16 days of early voting.
On Oct. 19, the first Saturday of early voting, 1,060 persons cast a ballot, and 1,223 cast a ballot on the second Saturday of early voting on Oct. 26.
The peak day in terms of receiving returned absentee ballots was 182 on Oct. 16.
On Friday, 55 absentee ballots were returned.
Jennifer Stone, Assistant Director of Elections and Registration in Oconee County, told me in an email message on Oct. 16 that the county had 34,268 registered voters at that time, with 32,057 active and 2,211 inactive.
“Registrations are still trickling in that have met the deadline,” she said. “So the numbers may change slightly.”
Inactive voters have not had contact with elections officials for five years, but they can vote and become active when they show up to vote and confirm their address or request an absentee ballot.
The number of active voters grew by 136 from the 32,057 Stone gave me on Oct. 16 to 32,193 at the end of the day on Friday.
Comparisons With 2020
The 2020 election was an atypical one, conducted in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In the 16 days of early voting in that election, 15,952 persons cast a ballot, or 53.1 percent of the active voters at the time the elections began.
By the end of early voting in 2020, Oconee County voters had returned 5,516 absentee ballots.
That brought total voting by the end of early voting to 63.8 percent, compared with the 70.6 percent so far this year.
Active voters increased by 38 during the election, and, in final voting, advance in-person voting was 62.9 percent, absentee was 23.1 percent, election day voting was 14.0 percent, for the total of 84.5 percent.
Earlier Voting
In 2020, then President Donald Trump received 65.9 percent of the vote in Oconee County, and Joseph Biden received 32.4 percent of the vote.
Oconee County ranked 88th in the state in the percentage of vote for Trump in 2020.
In 2016, Oconee County had ranked 83rd in the state in percentage vote for Trump.
In the March Presidential Primary this year, Oconee County ranked 153rd in the state, or sixth from the bottom, among Georgia’s 159 counties in the percentage of Republican Party vote going to Trump.
The only counties in the state ranking lower than Oconee County in terms of the percentage of Republican vote for Trump were Chatham, Cobb, Clarke, Fulton, and DeKalb, in that order.
The Trump vote in the Republican Primary in Oconee County of 77.4 percent was considerably below the statewide vote of 84.5 percent.
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