The First Two-Year General Senate Runoff in Georgia, Declared by Rep. Raphael Warnock, a Democrat on a Family Holiday
“No one wants to be dealing with politics in the middle of their family holiday,” said Raffensperger. It was even more difficult for the counties who had a hard time completing all their deadlines, as well as completing an election audit and executing a runoff in four weeks.
The law often is criticized by Democrats as a barrier to voting in the state and they say some elements target Black voters.
“People showed up in record numbers within the narrow confines of the time given to them by a state legislature that saw our electoral strength the last time and went after it with surgical precision,” Mr. Warnock said in his victory speech on Tuesday night in Atlanta. It doesn’t mean that hardship was put in the first place if voters worked so hard to overcome it.
In a general election in Georgia if no candidate gets more than 50% of the vote, a second race will be held between the two candidates who received the most votes. In the runoff, the candidate with the most votes wins.
Last week, Georgia had its third US Senate runoff in two years, and Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock defeated Republican challenger Herschel Walker.
More than 3.5 million people voted in the runoff, compared to 4.5 million who voted in the first round. There were less early in-person voter turnout compared to the previous year.
The secretary of state noted that the Georgia General Assembly convenes in January and “could select from a wide range of options to address this topic to help further to goal of safe, secure, and efficient elections.” Raffensperger did not endorse any specific system to replace general election runoffs.
Raffensperger’s call nearly two years after GOP Gov. Brian Kemp signed a wide-ranging elections law that, among other things, reduced the amount of time between a November election and potential runoff.
The origins of runoff elections go back to the 19th century, when some states began using the process in the final decades of the century to quash Black political power.