Oglethorpe County residents will be able to vote by absentee ballot as in previous elections after the Supreme Court rejected the Trump administration's request to change mail voting practices.
The decision on Sept. 14 allows for states like Georgia to continue their current election rules around mail-in and absentee ballots.
Only about 2-3% of Oglethorpe County voters request an absentee ballot, according to election assistant Steve McCannon. He also said county voters have increased by around 500 in the past two years.
“Probably (due to more people) moving into the county,” McCannon said.
In Georgia, you don’t need to provide a reason to request an absentee ballot and vote by mail, but you must be registered to vote and have a government-issued ID. Absentee ballots are typically used by military personnel, older adults, people with disabilities and people with transportation challenges.
The deadline to request an absentee ballot is Oct. 23.
You can request an application at the Georgia Secretary of State’s Absentee by Mail Request Portal and the application can be completed and submitted online, by email, fax, mail or in person at the local election office.
The election office is located at 41 Fairground Road, Lexington, Georgia 30648.
An absentee ballot must be delivered by Election Day, Nov. 3, to have it counted. You can check the status of your ballot and if you are registered to vote on Georgia’s My Voter Page.
The Court's decision was a response to President Donald Trump’s executive order that instructed the U.S. Postal Service to only mail ballots to individuals on a national list of eligible voters.
The Supreme Court rejected this requirement for the 2026 midterms.
Trump has claimed that voting by mail has led to unfair and fraudulent elections. U.S. election experts have refuted these claims.
There are safeguards in place to protect elections such as voter verification, ballot tracking and checks against duplicate voting. According to Jamie Carson, a professor in public and international affairs professor at UGA, mail-in ballot fraud is rare and isolated incidents of fraud should not deem the whole system deceptive.
A 2022 Pew Research Center survey found that only 37% of Republican voters are very or somewhat confident that absentee and mail ballots will be counted accurately, while 88% of Democrat voters are very or somewhat confident that they are being counted accurately.
“The uncertainty, the suspicion about the liability of the election system, which has been primarily a trope of Republicans and not Democrats, could actually hurt Republicans and discourage people from bothering to vote,” said Charles Bullock, a political science professor at UGA.