See Who Voted Early

Georgia allows anyone to download a list of all of the early voters. This list includes voter names and addresses.

While the page says “Voter Absentee Files,” it is a list of all votes received, including those that early voted in person. You can make sure your vote was received (if you early voted) and find which of your friends have not voted and might need a call or email to get them to the polls.

Here is the link for the file, followed by the steps to download the voter names:

https://sos.ga.gov/page/voter-absentee-files

You need to have a computer that can handle a large Excel file and have some basic Excel skills, but if you can sort and filter data, you are good to go.

Once on the page, there are a few fields that you need to set. After each field is changed, you need to wait for the page to update – usually just a few seconds – before moving to the next field.

1. Election Year – Set the Election Year to 2022
2. Election Category – This field gives you the option of selecting State Wide, County, or Municipality. The problem is that the only one that works reliably is State Wide.
3. Election Name – Here you will select the first entry, 11/8/22 – General/Special Election

In a few seconds, you should see a link to download a zip file. The day before the election, the zip file was about 232 MB. While you are on this screen, go ahead and download the pdf file “County Number List.” The zip file that you are downloading is made up of 160 individual files. There are 159 files (one for each county) and a State Wide file. If you are only interested in, say, Gwinnett County, then use the County Number List file to discover that Gwinnett County is number 67 and open the file 067.csv.

Here are some tips that may be helpful if you are not a pro with Excel –

1. Save the file you want to explore as an XLSX file (Excel native mode). It allows you to keep all of the changes you make to the file including column spacing.
2. I like to see the column headers. The easiest way to do this is to click on the column name (A) above the header of the first column, drag the pointer across all the columns, then release the mouse and double-click on any of the dividers up in the header field (the cursor changes when you hover over the divider). This will expand all of the columns to fit all of the data in the column.
3. Click the ‘view’ option at the top of the file, and under the “Freeze Panes” selector, choose Freeze Top Row. When you have scrolled way down in the file later, you will be glad you did.
4. I like to go ahead and delete the columns I know I won’t need – like the first one, County (which is GWINNETT in every cell)
5. If you are looking for a particular person, it is easier to sort by multiple fields – last name, then first name. Once the sort is done, highlight the column with the last names and do a search for the name you want. You can then scroll down the list of (alphabetical) first names. If you just do a global search without sorting, you may come up with street names as well as last names, and you will jump around.
6. If you are looking for neighbors who may not have voted, sort the file by Street Name and then Street #.
7. The “Ballot Style” column will tell you if the person voted IN PERSON or BY MAIL.