Georgia breaks voter turnout records ahead of final day of early voting

GEORGIA – Friday is the last day of early voting in Georgia.

Officials said the state has already surpassed early voting, with more than half of active voters casting ballots.

RELATED | Early voting in Georgia begins Tuesday: When, where to vote in your county and what to bring to the polls

Attempts were made to undermine the integrity of the process in the battleground state just days before the election.

Georgia's foreign minister's office said it has become aware of a video purporting to show a Haitian migrant with multiple Georgian IDs claiming to have voted multiple times.

The state called the video “targeted disinformation” and claimed it was likely foreign interference. He called on social media companies to remove such videos.

Secretary Brad Raffensperger released a statement Thursday evening saying:

“As Americans, we cannot allow our enemies to use lies to divide us and undermine our trust in our institutions – or in each other,” he said.

Chief Operating Officer Gabe Sterling added that users need to think before reposting.

“It’s at a higher level now. And I know people are talking about AI and everything. You don't have to have AI. “You have a random person make a random claim and it gets retweeted by an influencer or posted on TikTok and it just spreads there,” Sterling said. “One of the things I tell people all the time is: If you have a partisan itch, that's a social media scratch. Take it with a grain of salt and try to find other sources of information to make sure it is real before you start spreading it yourself.”

After 17 days of early voting in the Peach State, voter turnout is already over 50%. Towns County is in the lead with nearly 70% of voters.

To date, over 3.5 million ballots have been cast in Georgia.

RELATED | Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger celebrates milestone: Georgians cross the 3 million mark

State officials assured voters they were prepared to be in the spotlight.

“Well, we have invested more in list maintenance than any other state in the country. We have arguably the cleanest voter list in America. We just ran a citizenship check to show we don't have any non-citizens on the list. We found some that were registered before we reached the Real ID state in 2012, most of which did not engage in any voting activity, but we canceled those 20 out of 8.2 million. And what we're seeing is we're using voter IDs for every form of voting, from early in-person voting to absentee voting to voting on Election Day. So we have a very secure system. We know it’s safe, we know it’s safe and we know it’s easy to vote,” Sterling said.

The secretary of state's office said it expects voter turnout to increase today.

Those who cannot come will have to wait for election day on Tuesday.