On March 12, President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump predictably won their presidential primaries in the battleground state of Georgia, clinching the Democratic and Republican nominations respectively.
Biden received 95.19 percent of the vote for the Democratic primary while Trump received 88.48 percent of the vote for the Republican primary, paving the way for a rematch showdown.
With Trump narrowly ahead of Biden by 3 points in Georgia, according to a recent CBS News poll, nobody is likely to know who will win the once solid Republican-leaning state, especially with the current voter fraud claims and election interference cases that have plagued Fulton County .
Just on Wednesday, March 14 after the primary election, Fulton County judge, Scott McAfee threw out six counts of election interference against Trump and his 18 co-defendants, Fox News reported.
“The Court’s concern is less that the State has failed to allege sufficient conduct of the Defendants – in fact it has alleged an abundance. However, the lack of detail concerning an essential legal element is, in the undersigned opinion, fatal,” McAfee wrote. “As written, these six counts contain all the essential elements of the crimes but fail to allege sufficient detail regarding the nature of their commission, i.e., the underlying felony solicited.”
This began when the Fulton County District Attorney, Fani Willis, began her investigation over Trump and six of his co-defendants allegedly attempting to persuade numerous Georgia state officials, including Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and Gov. Brian Kemp to overturn the 2020 election results in the state over potential voter fraud.
In addition to voter fraud claims and election interference cases, people have appeared to not be enthusiastic about this election. It was observed across Georgia that there was a 65 percent decrease in early voter turnout compared to the state’s primary election in 2020. There was also light turnout on the primary’s election day.
However, the drop in early voter turnout could be due to SB 202 Georgia’s Election Integrity Act Gov. Kemp signed in 2021, which changed how absentee voting works. The earliest voters can request a mail-in ballot will be 11 weeks before an election instead of 180 days, and requesting and returning ballots will require voters to show IDs.
It also limits the use of ballot drop boxes, expands in-person early voting, and prohibits officials from sending out unsolicited absentee ballot request forms.
Georgia Southern University assistant political professor, Kimberly Martin, said that a lot of people voted absentee in 2020, which was seen less this year.
The election also drew several protest votes.
A Roswell woman voted for Democratic Congressman Dean Phillips, who dropped out of the race March 6 as a protest vote because she disagreed with the Gaza war.
“I’m hoping if enough people vote for not-Biden, he’ll get the message that he’s going to lose this election unless he does a ceasefire,” she said.
Another individual from Roswell who voted for the former South Carolina governor and U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley, said “I don’t like Trump. I don’t like Biden. I just wanted a different choice,” a man from Roswell said.
However, despite dropping out of the race on March 6, Haley surprisingly still managed to receive 77,798 of 587,638 votes (13.24 percent). She also received 4,990 of 12,588 votes (39.4 percent) in DeKalb County and 10,249 of 27,316 votes (37.52 percent) in Fulton County.
Nobody knows if either Biden or Trump will take Georgia and the election in general, but the country will be watching this rematch showdown.