Record early voting in runoff for Georgia Senate seat

The incumbent Democrat, Raphael Warnock, and his Republican challenger, Herschel Walker, are neck and neck as the election on 6 December approaches. The deputy secretary of state, Gabriel Sterling, said it was the largest in-person early voting day in Georgia history.

Neither candidate got above the 50% threshold in the midterm elections earlier this month, so under Georgia rules the fierce race went to a runoff.

With just a week to go before polls close, progressives in Georgia are leaving nothing to chance. A coalition of progressive groups has launched a massive canvassing effort for the Democratic party.

Leaders of the coalition, known as Georgia Organizers for Active Transformation, said on a Monday press call that they now have 2,500 canvassers knocking on 200,000 doors a day, and that canvassers have knocked on more than 2.5m doors in the three weeks since election day.

Georgia election officials had initially said that early voting could not take place on that day, but the Warnock campaign won a legal challenge to expand voting hours.