WTOC, Savannah, Georgia, news, weather and sports | Record Turnout for Chatham County

Record Turnout for Chatham County

It looks like Georgia set a record when it comes to voters getting to the polls yesterday. Turnout was big four years ago, but yesterday's election takes the prize. Georgia hit a new voter turnout high yesterday, including in Chatham County, as almost 80 percent of registered voters came out to the polls.

It's not over till it's over, or at least that seemed to be the case at the Chatham County Board of Elections the day after election day. "Today we're going through, making sure that we've wrapped the last of our counting," explained the board's Tom Cole.

The counting included almost 12,000 absentee ballots and hundreds of provisional ballots. And that's in addition to the huge number of ballots cast yesterday as tens of thousands waited in lines to make their votes count.

"We were so excited, we ended up with a record-setting voter number turnout," said Cole. "I think countywide we did 78 percent."

Precinct 1-15 poll manager Ray Marchant has worked the polls for more than ten years. He says he's never seen as many voters as he did yesterday. "We had a possibility of 1,077 voters at Southside Fire Deptartment. Out of those, we had 838 which gives us 90.3 percent, which is an exceptional turnout."

As board of election workers finish going through the last of the bags of provisional and absentee ballots, they say many of them were cast by first-time voters. "We knew this election was going to be very very close, and people were interested in the turnout," said Marchant.

With an overall smooth election day in Chatham County, Cole says now is the time to look ahead. "We're going to continue after the election to get feedback from poll managers and tweak the process and see what improvements we can make."

The board of elections says the ballots that remained today in no way would have affected the outcome of any of the races, and by late this afternoon they were finished counting all of the ballots.

Reported by: Hena Daniels, hdaniels@wtoc.com