It will be more than just Georgia residents who will be looking for live results of the 2018 election, and those across the nation following the Peach State’s gubernatorial race will have a few different options for following along online.
The race for governor has attracted national attention as Stacey Abrams looks to become the state’s first black governor against the once-heavily favored Brian Kemp. As Democrats hope to regain control of Congress, with huge voter turnouts expected, many are also turning their attention to close gubernatorial races. The tension is certainly thick for this particular midterm election, with voters on both sides of the partisan divide awaiting results with bated breath.
Final polls ahead of the Georgia governor’s race showed that Abrams and Kemp were deadlocked, as the Inquisitr reported, posing the distinct possibility that neither reaches the 50 percent threshold to win outright. If neither hit that mark, then they head to a December runoff election.
Though polls close at 7 p.m. EST, the close race could mean that it will take several hours before voters know who will be the next governor of the Peach State.
The race has been contentious, with allegations that Kemp has used his position as Secretary of State in Georgia to improperly purge voters from the rolls. A judge ruled that Kemp’s policy of “exact match” voting requirement — one that would bar voters who have slight differences in the way their names are spelled between government databases — needed to be adjusted.
As the New York Times noted, these policies appeared to affect minority voters more heavily than any other demographic.
“The controversy over voting rights has been most heated in the Georgia race, especially after The Associated Press reported more than 50,000 voters were stuck in a ‘pending’ status because their registration forms did not precisely match personal information on government databases — under a system that can flag voters simply because of a missing hyphen. Nearly 70 percent of the registrants were African-American, the news agency found.”
And in the run-up to Election Day, Kemp’s office claimed, without citing evidence, that Democrats had attempted to hack voting systems in the state.
Stacey Abrams reacts to Kemp’s hacking probe – CNN https://t.co/njFN4rZ5Z0 via @GoogleNews
— allengreenfield (@allengreenfield) November 6, 2018
Opponents called his allegations a last-minute political stunt, and Kemp has not offered evidence of his claims.
Those who want to follow live results of the 2018 Georgia election can find up-to-the-minute voting totals from the New York Times and Politico . There are also a number of different options for those who want to follow livestream coverage, with news stations WSB-TV and Fox 5 Atlanta offering online video as well.