Vampires, voter access and the turnout dance: Georgia's Senate runoff remains a question mark

ATLANTA — Over the last week, LaTosha Brown has been in full-throttle mode, leading grassroots voting rights activists fanning across Georgia, canvassing door to door, hosting screenings of "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever," dancing to hip-hop outside polling stations.

But after watching people wait more than an hour in some metro Atlanta areas to vote in the Senate runoff race, Brown is uncertain whether her group's efforts to increase turnout will be enough to secure a win for Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock over Republican Herschel Walker on Tuesday.

"It's a tight race. The Democratic base is fired up," said Brown, co-founder of Black Voters Matter, which has spent $2.5 million to boost turnout in the runoff. "We can't out-organize voter suppression, but we're just doing everything we can to win."

With voter motivation high on both sides, early turnout in this runoff broke daily records three times last week — a fact Georgia's Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, used to dismiss allegations of voter suppression as "conspiracy theories no more valid than Bigfoot."

But overall early voter turnout is still lower than previous elections, with far, compared with 2.5 million in the general election and 3 million in the 2021 Senate runoffs.