The Oconee County Board of Elections and Registration agreed on Monday (9/14/2026) to add an extra hour at the end of the day in the final week of early voting for the Nov. 3 elections.
The Board took the action on the recommendation of Sharon Gregg, Director of Elections and Registration for the county, who said extending the voting day in the week of Oct. 26 through 30 would accommodate voters who work until 5 p.m.
Early voting begins on Tuesday, Oct. 13, and continues through Oct. 30. Included are two Saturdays, Oct. 17 and Oct. 24.
Voting hours have been 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. during the week and 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturdays. Advance voting is at the County Administrative Building, 7635 Macon Highway, north of Watkinsville. The hours now will be 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. in the final week.
Gregg on Monday also told the Board that the state Election Board has mandated that the county add an additional step at the beginning of the voting process for the Nov. 3 election.
The poll worker will not only have to check the voter in electronically on the poll pad but also then manually transfer the name and address of the voter to a sheet of paper to create a second record of persons who voted.
Gregg also told the Board that the Secretary of State Office had informed her to go forward with usual procedures for absentee voting despite President Donald Trump’s executive order giving the United States Postal Service a role in determining which ballots should be delivered.
The U.S. Supreme Court that evening released its decision not to allow the postal service to play that role.
Early Voting
Gregg said that she and her staff had been discussing adding the extra hour in the final week of early voting “to accommodate voters that are working that get off at 5. This will give them an additional opportunity to come in and vote early.”
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| Gregg 9/14/2026 |
Assistant Direction of Elections and Registration Jennifer Stone said that the shifts of poll workers could be moved around so that no overtime would need to be paid to extend the voting hours.
The staff would have to work an additional hour, she said.
“One thing I'd like to ask you all to do, if possible, is to see if you can track the last hour to see what kind of traffic we get to see how much of an impact it has,” Board Member Kirk Shook said.
The Board voted unanimously to add the additional hour to the final week of early voting.
In the May 19 Party Primary and Nonpartisan election, 6,640 (53.4 percent) of the 12,445 ballots cast were cast by Advance In Person voting.
New List
In her Director’s Report on Monday, Gregg said the State Election Board had revised its regulations for conducting elections related to creation of “a numbered list of voters” in the election.
“Previously, it just said once the voter would check in at the poll pad, their name would then be added to a numbered list of voters,” Gregg said. “Now it says the voter's name shall then be recorded in ink and entered on the appropriate numbered list of voters.”
“So the new process now is when a voter checks in at the poll pad,” Gregg continued, “each poll pad station will have a numbered list of voters in physical form, and the poll official will then write each voter's name on that numbered list in the order that they check in at that poll pad station.”
“But we'll still have the e-list, the electronic list, from the poll pad?” Board Chair Jay Hanley asked. “This is just an additional list that's on paper?”
“Correct,” Gregg responded. “The person that checks them in will write the name on the list, how it's listed in the poll pad, which is how it will be listed in their voter registration.”
“There's still the process that the voter has to sign the voter certificate and that verifies their information,” she said. “So while all of that process is going on, they'll log their name on the voter list.”
Election Dates and Registration
The first day to request an absentee ballot was Aug. 17, and Stone said the county already had received 418 requests.
Gregg said she expects to be able to send out ballots on or shortly after Oct. 5, the first day she is allowed to do so.
The deadline to register also is Oct. 5, and the deadline to request an absentee ballot is Oct. 23.
Stone said on Monday that she could not give a registration number because the system was down, but on the following day she said the county had 32,765 active voters and 1,740 inactive voters, for a total of 34,505 voters.
At the end of the May 19 primary, the county had 32,161 active voters.
Postal Service And Ballots
“We've got this fiasco going with the United States Postal Service tied up in courts and so forth and so on,” Board Member Ken Davis said. “If that stands, and we have something coming up from the Post Office, how big a problem is that going to be for us?”
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| Davis 9/14/2026 |
“October 5th is not that far away,” Davis added.
“We're still waiting on guidance from the state as far as that goes,” Gregg said. “But the last update I've gotten from them is nothing in Georgia is going to change.”
“It still could possibly,” she added.
“I'm just curious because we're not prepared,” Davis said. “We're not ready for that if it happened.”
“The last guidance I received was to proceed as normal,” Hanley said.
The U.S. Supreme Court announced its ruling that evening.
Video
The video below is of the Sept. 14 meeting of the Board of Elections and Registration, held in the Commission Chamber of the County Administrative Building.
Discussion of early voting starts at 2:35 in the video.
Gregg began her Director’s Report at 6:11 in the video.
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