It is primary election day across Georgia, and Channel 2 Action News is getting reports that it is a very, very low turnout statewide.
Voters will decide who will be the primary winners for the Public Service Commission.
Channel 2’s Richard Elliot went to one polling site in Gwinnett County on Tuesday, and as of 4 p.m., only about 15 people had shown up to vote.
One of those people was Doug Beard.
“It was easy to vote. This is the first time at this precinct. They moved it from the church down the street,” Beard said.
“Are you surprised it’s as empty as this?” Elliot asked Beard.
“Not really,” Beard said.
The state of Georgia says voter turnout for the PSC primary race could be less than 2% statewide.
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Zach Manifold is Gwinnett County’s elections supervisor. He said turnout was even lower at that site.
“I think at 1 p.m., we had a little over 3,000 voters here in Gwinnett County on Election Day. That’s just about half a percent of our registered voters here in Gwinnett,” Manifold said.
There are a lot of reasons.
PSC races generally don’t attract a lot of voters, even though the outcome could directly affect your power and gas bills.
This is the first PSC race since 2022 after a lawsuit delayed the elections.
Elliot reached out to Georgia’s elections director, Blake Evans. He said there’s such low voter turnout that they’re going to have to change the way they report the data to protect the identities of some voters.
Extreme low turnout in rural counties could inadvertently make some secret ballots not so secret.
“Our office is committed to preserving everybody’s Constitutional right to a secret ballot. And so, we want to make sure that we do that. Our election night results reporting tool has the technology to do that. That’s what we want to do,” Evans said.
The way they report election results here in Georgia can get very granular, but if there are only two or three voters in a county, people may figure out how those people voted. So the secretary of state’s office will report aggregate numbers instead.
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