STONE MOUNTAIN, Ga. (AP) — Flags telling people to “Vote Here” fluttered in not only English, but Spanish, Korean, Vietnamese and Chinese at the Mountain Park Activity Building as a steady stream passed through its doors to cast their ballots in the 2024 election.

One by one, the voters who turned out Thursday were adding to what’s become a colossal heap of early ballots in the key swing state of Georgia. Early voting, scheduled to end Friday, has been so robust that nearly 4 million ballots could be cast before Election Day dawns on Tuesday.

“I normally try to vote early because I’m a mailman and it’s hard to me to get over here on an election day,” said Mike King of Lilburn, who voted for Trump Thursday before scattering leaves as he departed in his red pickup truck.

Voters like King are part of the reason early vote records have been shattered not only in Georgia and other presidential battlegrounds such as North Carolina but even in states without major contests on the ballot like New Jersey and Louisiana. During the pandemic in 2020, then-President Donald Trump railed against early voting and mail voting, claiming they were part of a plot to steal the election from him. In 2022, after falsely blaming his 2020 loss on early voting, he kept at it.

In both elections, Republicans largely stayed away from voting early, preferring to do it on Election Day. This year Trump has emphasized early voting and his supporters are responding. So far Republicans have flooded the polls in places where in-person early voting is available. Though they’ve increased their mail voting too, it’s been at a much lower rate.

“The Trump effect is real,” said Jason Snead, executive director of Honest Elections, a conservative group that focuses on election policy.

So far about 64 million people have cast ballots in the 2024 election, which is more than one-third the total number who voted in 2020. Not all states register voters by party, but in those that do the early electorate is slightly more Republican than Democratic, according to AP Elections Data.

Early vote data, of course, does not tell you who will win an election. It doesn’t tell you who the voters support, only basic demographic information and sometimes party affiliation. One demographic may seem unusually energized because it dominates the early vote, only to have no more voters left to turn out on Election Day.

Campaigns encourage early voting because it lets them “bank” their most reliable supporters, freeing resources to turn out lower-propensity backers on Election Day.

“I’ve largely viewed the idea of going back to Election Day as trying to put toothpaste back in a tube,” Snead said.

Election officials say the early vote is already racking up impressive totals. In North Carolina, all but two of 25 western counties most harmed by Hurricane Helene in late September are posting higher early in-person turnout percentages compared with 2020.

Statewide, over 3.7 million people had cast early in-person ballots as of early Friday, exceeding the early in-person total for all of 2020, the North Carolina State Board of Elections said. Early in-person voting ends Saturday afternoon in the state.

“Hurricane Helene did not stop us from voting,” said Karen Brinson Bell, the state board’s executive director and top voting official in that swing state. She added that voters have been appreciative and “we are seeing a lot of civility.”

In Georgia, so many people have voted early that a state election official says it could be a “ghost town” at the polls on Election Day.

There’s no doubt that part of that is due to Trump. Large signs at his rallies spell out “VOTE EARLY!” and others have also been pushing Republicans to cast ballots before Tuesday, even by mail.

“This election is too important to wait!” proclaimed one flyer mailed to a voter in Georgia by the Elon Musk-funded America PAC. “President Trump is counting on patriots like you to apply for an absentee ballot and bank your vote today.”

Tona Barnes is one person who has heeded that message. Instead of voting on Election Day, she voted early for the first time on Thursday in the northern Atlanta suburb of Marietta.

“He keeps putting it out there to vote early,” she said of Trump.

Others in Georgia, both Democrats and Republicans, say they vote early for convenience.

Ashenafi Arega, who voted Thursday for Vice President Kamala Harris at the Mountain Park Activity Building in suburban Gwinnett County, said he cast a ballot early “to save time.”

“I think on Election Day the line will be long,” said Arega, who owns an importing business. “It will be discouraging.”

Gabe Sterling, chief operating officer for Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, said Wednesday that the state already had hit two-thirds of the entire turnout for the 2020 election, when Georgia set a record number of nearly 5 million votes cast.

“There’s a possibility it could be a ghost town on Election Day,” Sterling said. “We had less than a million show up during COVID in 2020 with all the uses of pre-Election Day voting.”

Nearly as many people had voted early by this time in 2020 in Georgia, but the turnout pattern was different. For a brief time during the pandemic, Georgia allowed voters to request mail ballots online without sending in a form with a hand-inked signature, and allowed counties to set up many drive-through drop boxes. But fueled by Trump’s insistence that he had been cheated, Republican lawmakers allowed only sharply limited drop boxes going forward, imposed new deadlines on mail ballot requests and went back to requiring a hand-signed absentee request form.

That law and others in Georgia led to cries that Republicans were trying to suppress votes. Republicans said 2024’s robust early turnout proves that isn’t so.

“I think that gives the lie to this idea that having some pretty basic security measures in place somehow discourages people from voting,” said Josh McKoon, chairman of the Georgia Republican Party.

But Tolulope Kevin Olasanoye, executive director of the Democratic Party of Georgia, discounts those statements, saying recent fights about State Election Board rules, which ended with a judge throwing out the rules, prove Republicans are preparing to decry the legitimacy of any vote they don’t win in Georgia.

“I think there is no doubt that these folks were trying to muck up the waters a little bit to have something to point to potentially down the road,” Olasanoye said.

Republicans are thrilled with the turnout in heavily GOP counties, which in some cases is approaching two-thirds of active voters. Through Thursday, about 39% of voters in the majority Black Democratic stronghold of Augusta-Richmond County had cast ballots, while nearly 54% of voters in the neighboring Republican suburb of Columbia County had voted.

“Just from a winning and losing standpoint, the more votes I have put in the bank by Friday, the fewer votes I have to push to the polls on Tuesday to win,” McKoon said.

Olasanoye, though, expressed confidence that Harris was broadening her coalition and would still win.

“Democrats and the vice president, we’re just doing all right,” he said.

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Associated Press reporters Gary Robertson and Makiya Seminera contributed from Raleigh, North Carolina.

Both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris know if they want to win Georgia, they need to secure the Black vote. Black people make up Georgia’s largest minority voting bloc, representing roughly 30% of all registered voters in the swing state.

Black men played a critical role in electing President Joe Biden. A total of 83% of Black men in Georgia cast a ballot for Biden in 2020, the Washington Post reported. Now, a week before the 2024 election, the candidates are crisscrossing the state to reach Black men, with Harris working to maintain Democrats’ traditional edge among the demographic.

Over 77% of Black Georgians plan to vote for Harris, according to a recent poll from the Atlanta Journal Constitution. That’s a jump from the 70% who were backing Biden when asked in June, but still far less than the 90% of votes Biden received from Black Georgians in the 2020 election.  

There have been rumblings for months among some pollsters that Black men might be leaving the Democratic party, instead choosing to throw their support behind Trump.

Despite what some polls are saying, John Taylor believes “the reality is very different.”

Taylor is the co-founder of the Black Male Initiative Georgia, a nonprofit that focuses on getting Black men civically engaged in the Peach State. Through door-to-door canvassing and events, his group has had over 195,000 conversations with Black men during this election cycle. The vast majority — roughly 83% — voiced their support for Harris.

“I don’t believe that we’re more inclined to vote for Trump,” Taylor says. “I think it’s an atrocious, racist trope to think that because Trump has 34 charges, or his misogynistic behavior, that it in some way endears him to Black men. That’s not who we are.”USA TODAY spoke with Black men on the ground in Georgia to see where they stood on the matchup between Harris and Trump.

A house divided

Josh Gossett, a 33-year-old small business owner in Atlanta, has seen this dynamic play out in his own family. Gossett voted early for Harris. His younger brother Aaron will be casting a ballot for Trump this year.

He believes his brother was eventually won over by Trump’s antagonistic attitude.

“It isn’t about the policies,” Gossett tells USA TODAY. “For people like my brother, it really is about opposition to the mainstream. They see Trump as an avatar for all their anger and frustrations that they’ve had with the system.”

Gossett feels that system has often “left behind” Black men like him and his brother, leaving them “underpaid and underemployed” in the modern workforce. Those disparities in employment and financial opportunity then translate to frustrations at the ballot box.

That’s when a politician like Trump enters, fueling economic insecurities with anti-immigrant rhetoric.

“If any group of people is vulnerable to the idea that immigrants are ‘stealing’ their jobs, it’s Black men,” Gossett says.

‘Racism got real bad under Trump’

Robert James is a 67-year-old rideshare driver who lives in a suburb of Atlanta. While driving, he’s inundated with constant reminders of the presidential election—on the radio, interstate billboards, and customers eager to chat about politics. Like many Americans, he’s excited for the election to be over.

“I’m tired of seeing the commercials,” he sighs.

But campaign ads aside, James knows this election is important—particularly for Black men. He fears that racism would escalate under a second Trump presidency.

“After Trump was elected, it reminded me of the days after Sept.11th,” James says. “Racism got real bad under Trump, after he first got in there. It gave people permission to be racist.”

Like the rise in hate crimes faced by Muslim, Arab, Sikh, and South Asian Americans following the 2001 terrorist attacks, violence against Black Americans skyrocketed in the wake of Trump’s election.

According to a study by the Southern Poverty Law Center, there were 187 hate incidents committed against Black people in the first 10 days following the 2016 election. Some of these amounted to hate crimes.

It is facts like this that make it even more disheartening for James to see fellow Black men support Trump. “My question for them is: why? Why do you continue to back this man? You see how he is.”

Harris’ plans for Black men

Thousands of people gathered to hear former First Lady Michelle Obama speak at a rally on Tuesday in College Park, just south of downtown. Many were bussed in from Atlanta’s historically Black colleges and universities, proudly donning the colors of Harris’ sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha.

But Laquann Wilson, a 27-year-old student from Alabama State University, traveled hours to attend the nonpartisan rally. Wilson says he’s open to “learning to work together” across political differences but doesn’t identify strongly with either party.

“At the end of the day, we all need jobs. The cost of gas is high for everyone. So, if you can help me with a better economic policy, I don’t care if you’re Republican or Democrat,” Wilson explains. “I just want a president who is wise and has clear policies for the Black community.”

Taylor, the co-founder of the Black Male Initiative, believes that Harris has the better policies for Black men.

He points to her plan to provide loans that would forgive up to $20,000 for Black entrepreneurs to start a business, as well as her goal to legalize marijuana so people of color can have access to the booming multi-billion-dollar industry.

But Taylor emphasizes that it’s important to remember – especially when discussing the role of Black men in the election – that the Black vote doesn’t operate in a vacuum.“We have always been amongst the most progressive voting blocs in this country since the inception of our right to vote – in spite of being drawn and quartered, tarred and feathered, and killed on the road to the polls.”

So, while the Black vote “is a powerful voice and critical component,” Taylor says, it’s not up to them alone to put any particular candidate in office.

“If we don’t win, it’s not because enough Black men or women didn’t show up. It’s because well-meaning white women and men didn’t vote their conscious. That’s what is going to keep Vice President Kamala Harris from the White House. It’s not the brothers.”

Melissa Cruz is an elections reporting fellow who focuses on voter access issues for the USA TODAY Network. You can reach her at mcruz@gannett.com or on X, formerly Twitter, at @MelissaWrites22.

Georgia’s top election official on Thursday night blamed “likely foreign interference” for a video that is quickly racking up views on social media and purports to show a newly-arrived Haitian migrant claiming he voted for Kamala Harris just six months after arriving in the United States. 

The video is “targeted disinformation,” Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said, as he specifically called on Elon Musk, the billionaire Donald Trump supporter, to take down the video. Raffensperger said his office is working with federal officials to investigate the video, which had more than half a million views on Musk’s social media platform X as of Thursday night.

In a press release, Raffensperger said that “we ask Elon Musk and the leadership of other social media platforms to take this down,” adding: “This is obviously fake and part of a disinformation effort. Likely it is a production of Russian troll farms.”

Raffensperger said federal law enforcement officials at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency are investigating the video. 

Last week, U.S. intelligence officials blamed Russia for a fake video designed to smear Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz. 

During the 2024 election cycle, Musk has emerged as one of Trump’s top boosters, pouring roughly $119 million into a Super PAC, called America PAC, to promote the former president. Musk has frequently shared unfounded claims of anti-Trump election fraud, and this week he requested that users submit instances of “election integrity issues” to the “X Election Integrity Community,” a channel that features America PAC’s branding.

While Musk hasn’t personally shared the new video flagged by Raffensperger, the video has been shared in multiple posts featured in the X Election Integrity Community.

The video depicts a young Black male claiming he is from Haiti and came to the U.S. “six months ago.”

“We are voting Kamala Harris,” the male says in the video. “Yesterday we voted in Gwinnett County and today we’re voting in Fulton County.”

The male and another male in the video then display six Georgia IDs, at least three of them duplicates, apparently as proof that they’d acquired the documents required to vote. 

After Trump lost in Georgia in 2020, he and his allies attempted to overturn the election results in the state — leading to criminal charges for Trump and 18 others. In the years since, Trump and the MAGA movement have worked diligently to cement his election lies into policy in the state, packing election boards at the state and county level with election deniers.  

In both counties mentioned in the fake video — Gwinnett and Fulton — election officials have questioned the results of 2020’s election and backed rules passed by the new MAGA majority on the Georgia State Election Board that were designed to give county election officials authority to arbitrarily refuse to certify election results.

Those rules, and another designed to slow counting of votes, were recently found by judges to be “unconstitutional” and will not be in place for Tuesday’s election. 

Election board members in the two counties did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

The fake video, which began circulating as early as 1 p.m. on Thursday, has more than 500,000 views in various posts on X. The disinformation video comes amid Trump and his VP candidate J.D. Vance’s vicious smear campaign against Haitian migrants living in Springfield, Ohio; they have baselessly claimed the migrants are eating neighbors’ cats and dogs. Trump has threatened to deport them, even though most of them are living in the U.S. legally.

It is illegal, and extremely rare, for noncitizens to vote in federal elections. Republicans have nonetheless frequently claimed that Democrats are allowing migrants into the U.S. so they can gain their votes, and the GOP intends to use claims about noncitizens voting — however unfounded — to call the 2024 election results into question if Harris wins or has the lead.

Not long before Raffensperger’s press release, a screenshot of the video was shared on the Facebook page of Georgia’s most prominent election denial network, VoterGA.

“He needs to go to jail,” wrote a woman in the forum, referring to the male in the video.

Musk’s call to use X as a forum for sharing claims of election fraud has been heeded by users, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.). Last week, Greene took to X to claim that voting machines in her district had “switched votes.” 

Local election officials and Raffensperger’s office quickly debunked the claim, saying that the voter’s printed ballot did not match up with her selections on the machine because the woman had made mistakes herself. 

Greene has gone on to continue to claim that machines are flipping votes, posting a video on X Thursday night that purported to show one such instance in Arkansas.