With one election behind them, Georgia voters must immediately prepare for the next—the U.S. Senate runoff between incumbent Democrat Raphael Warnock and Republican challenger Herschel Walker, neither of whom reached the 50 percent vote threshold the state requires.
The runoff will take place on Dec. 6.
That’s much sooner than the 2020 election’s runoff—which occurred nine weeks later on Jan. 5, 2021.
It’s a fairly inconvenient time, with early voting starting just after Thanksgiving and an election when most people are preparing for the holidays.
A few voters won’t have to make another trip to the polls. Those who cast absentee ballots from abroad—3,855 of them—were offered ranked-choice voting in case of a runoff, Deputy Secretary of State Gabriel Sterling told The Epoch Times.
It was part of Georgia’s election reform to shorten the runoff waiting period while complying with a federal judge’s decision from some years before, Charles Bullock, University of Georgia political science professor, told The Epoch Times.
In the 2020 general election, culminating in the January 2021 runoff, both Senate seats were at stake.
Warnock challenged Kelly Loeffler, who was appointed in December 2019 by Gov. Brian Kemp to fill the vacancy left by the resignation of the ailing Johnny Isakson.
That race was for the two years remaining in Isakson’s term.
Democrat Jon Ossoff was challenging Republican incumbent David Perdue, who was up for reelection for another six-year term.
The two Senate races, with the general and runoff elections for each, cost more than $500 million.
The Ossoff–Perdue race was the most expensive in U.S. history, while Loeffler–Warnock was the third-most expensive. The races added to the turmoil about the election that led to the events of Jan. 6, 2021.
This year, the runoff will take place four weeks after the general election. Georgia’s 2021 Election Integrity Act, known as Senate Bill 202, shortened the wait.
In the past, the state conducted runoffs after a four-week wait. A few years ago, a federal judge ruled that four weeks didn’t allow enough time for overseas voters, such as service members based abroad, to request, receive, and return absentee ballots.
Bullock said that the decision only covered Georgia’s federal elections, such as U.S. Senate and House races.
There have only been 10 such races in history, the upcoming one being the 11th. State races—including countless local races such as county commission or school board that go to runoffs—weren’t affected.
Bullock said the long wait for the January 2021 Senate runoffs—and a down-ballot race people tend to forget about, a Public Service Commission runoff won by Bubba McDonald—was something no one wanted to repeat.
Generally, the longer the wait, the lower the runoff turnout.
He said the 2021 runoff was an anomaly because of the enormous spending and publicity.
So the election reform bill reduced the span to four weeks, Bullock said.
They accommodated the federal court ruling by giving overseas absentee ballot voters the option of ranked-choice voting. And to them only.
Those who voted in Nov. 8’s election received the choice of selecting a No. 2 candidate should their top candidate lose and be eliminated from the runoff.
That means that Georgia voters overseas who voted for Libertarian Chase Oliver—who garnered 81,175 votes, or 2.07 percent, and didn’t make the runoff cut—will be reallocated to the voter’s second choice, Bullock said.
Sterling said a few foreign ballots were cast on paper, but most were cast electronically.
