(ATLANTA)-Georgia’s elections system ranks among the best in the nation for voter access in pandemic preparedness, according to a new report by the RAND Corp.

The report, authored by four experts in national and cyber security, assessed how adaptable the elections systems of all 50 states and the District of Columbia are to life under COVID-19, and it found that Georgia was one of only nine states with high flexibility for responding to the pandemic.

“When experts conduct real and independent research, it is clear Georgia is a national leader in elections administration,” said Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. “We were the first state in the country to have the trifecta of automatic voter registration, at least 16 days of early voting and no-excuse absentee voting. These early investments paid strong dividends as Georgia moved quickly to uphold access to the vote during the COVID-19 pandemic.”

On Aug. 5, the RAND Corp. released a report titled “An Assessment of State Voting Processes: Preparing for Elections During a Pandemic.”
Georgia was one of only nine states in the report to have “the policies that researchers judged as being most important to encourage safer voter participation during the 2020 elections.” Georgia was the only state in the Southeast and only one of two on the East Coast (New Jersey was the other) to receive a high flexibility rating.

The key policies that the authors identified as crucial to election system flexibility during the pandemic were automatic voter registration, early voting and no excuse absentee voting. Georgia has had automatic voter registration since September 2016 and no excuse absentee voting since 2005. Georgia’s early voting option stretches back even farther.

While some states scrambled to implement similar measures in the wake of COVID-19, hitting legal and logistical hurdles, Georgia was already prepared with policies that provided several safe options to voters. Because these are permanent features of Georgia’s system, not temporary policy changes, the state’s election system is similarly positioned for future COVID-19 elections, according the report.Beyond these tools, the Secretary of State’s office quickly built a large-scale absentee ballot voting system in a matter of weeks, taking on much of the cost and logistical challenge from county officials who are normally tasked with handling the absentee ballot process.

For the June 9 elections, the Secretary of State’s office mailed absentee ballot requests to 6.9 million active registered voters in Georgia; secured a vendor to print, package and mail both the absentee ballots and requests; and provided extra equipment to the counties to process the surge in submitted absentee ballots.Additionally, the Secretary of State’s office purchased and distributed Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) to the counties and provided grants to the counties to purchase PPE on their own to keep poll workers and voters safe on election day.

Georgia is recognized as a national leader in elections. It was the first state in the country to implement the trifecta of automatic voter registration, at least 16 days of early voting (which has been called the “gold standard”), and no-excuse absentee voting. Georgia continues to set records for voter turnout and election participation, seeing the largest increase in average turnout of any state in the 2018 midterm election and record primary turnout in 2020, with over 1.1 million absentee-by-mail voters and over 1.2 million in-person voters utilizing Georgia’s new, secure, paper ballot voting system.