As Oct. 5 Deadline Approaches, Georgians Urged To Check Their Voter Registration
Angie Wead, left, and Bola Tilghman, center, answer questions from a voter outside the Wesley Chapel Library Branch in Decatur on Tuesday.
Emil Moffatt/WABE
Michelle Price says she’s been voting since she turned 18.
“I’ve never missed any voting: the local, the state, the community, I’m always voting,” said Price, now in her early 60s. “It’s very important, and I don’t understand why people have just gotten so apathetic about it and ‘oh well, things are going’, but they oughta see the state that the country’s in now. We’re in some trouble.”
Price said recently she started getting mail saying she was not a registered voter. So, to double-check, she pulled into the parking lot of the Candler Library in Decatur on Tuesday where a voter registration drive was happening.
Volunteers held signs along the roadway and a table with registration forms and information was set up for National Voter Registration Day, a nationwide push on social media and in real life to remind people to check on their status.
Nadine Ali was there volunteering on behalf the DeKalb NAACP. She says she’s seen a lot of interest in the election in the last several weeks.
“Usually, after August, that’s when people love to get all excited,” said Ali. “ They come out of the woodwork, like they say.”
At the DeKalb County Public Library on Wesley Chapel Road, Bola Tilghman was volunteering to help register voters.
“We know there are a lot of shenanigans going on, but we want to make sure people have the right – their given right – for them to be able to get out and exercise their right to vote,” said Tilghman.
Voters are being encouraged to double-check their registration, especially if they’ve recently moved or haven’t voted lately.
“If you have moved, we want to make sure we’ve captured the right address, make sure we’ve got you in the right precinct,” said Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in a roundtable hosted by the Atlanta Press Club on Tuesday. “Especially when you’re looking at state house or state senate or some of these county commission district lines. Yes, you’re still in the same county, but now you’re in a different commissioner line, and so that’s very important.”
The voter registration deadline is Oct. 5. The process can be completed online at the secretary of state’s website, where voters can also request an absentee ballot to vote by mail, amid the pandemic.
More than a million Georgians have requested absentee ballots, which began arriving in mailboxes this weekend. Voters can return those ballots by mail or by using a drop box location set up by counties.
Early in-person voting begins Oct. 12 and runs through Oct. 30.
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