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

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

Officials said the state has already shattered early voting numbers, with more than half of active voters having cast their ballots.

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

Just days before the elections, attempts have been made to undermine the integrity of the process in the key battleground state.

Georgia’s Foreign Ministry said it was aware of a video claiming that a Haitian migrant with multiple Georgian IDs had voted multiple times.

The state called the video “targeted disinformation” and claimed it was likely foreign interference, and asked social media companies to remove similar 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 faith in our institutions – or each other,” he said.

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

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

After 17 days of early voting in the Peach State, turnout is already over 50%. Towns County leads the way with almost 70% voting.

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

RELATED | Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger celebrates milestone as Georgians pass 3 million mark

State officials assured voters they are prepared for the spotlight to be on them.

“Well, we’ve done more to invest in list maintenance than any other state in the country. We may have the cleanest voting record in America. We have just done a citizenship audit to show that there are no non-citizens on the roll. We found some that were registered before we got Real ID state in 2012, most of which did not engage in any kind of voting activity, but we went ahead and canceled those 20 out of 8.2 million. And what we’re seeing is that we’re using voter ID for every form of voting, in-person voting, mail-in voting, voting, and Election Day voting. 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 Minister of Foreign Affairs said today that he expected an increase in turnout.

Those who can’t attend will have to wait until Election Day on Tuesday.

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