Early voting in GA

The WSJ has an interesting report on early voting in GA.

Of the 263,408 ballots already cast, 38% were by voters who identify themselves as African Americans, even though blacks account for just 29% of Georgia’s 5.6 million voters. Registration is up from about 4.3 million in November 2004 and about 4 million in November 2000.

How do they know this, you might ask? Georgia keeps voter registration data by race, ethnicity and gender, and releases a daily tally of the ballots cast and by whom. I'm not sure how I feel about this.

Voting early is a good way to avoid bad faith voter challenges on election day, which is one reason why the Obama campaign has been using their organization in states to encourage early voting.

What I find most astounding is that 1.3 MILLION new voters have been registered in GA since the last presidential election. To put this in perspective, this means that voter registration went up by an amazing 24%! How many of those, do you think, are new Republican voters?

Voter registration is up dramatically in nearly every state and no one really knows how this is going to impact the voting this cycle until the votes are counted, but it should make for a very interesting election night.