ATLANTA — As Georgians head to the polls for early voting in record numbers, you might expect that to create a bit of a crunch at voting sites.
In some counties, there are tools at your disposal to see exactly when might be a good time to go vote without having to battle a crowd.
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When is the best time to vote?
The Georgia Secretary of State's Office recently highlighted how several counties - including Gwinnett, Cobb and Forysth in metro Atlanta - do post their wait times.
As a general rule, if you're curious about your specific county, you'll have to visit their elections website and search around for whether they have a wait time tracker or not. You can also search "(County name) voting wait time lines" on Google or another search engine.
Below, find the voting line wait time resources for the counties that publish and an update on the larger counties around Atlanta that do not:
Best voting times - Gwinnett County
Gwinnett has a very easily digestible list that shows the early voting location, the location's wait time and when the location's wait time was last updated.
Best voting times - Clayton County
Clayton County has an easily digestible site that, like Gwinnett's, lists out the location, its current wait time and when the wait time was last updated.
Best voting times - Cobb County
Cobb employs an interactive map to display its wait times. It shows pin-drops where early voting sites are, and a color of green (less than 20 minutes), yellow (between 20-40 minutes), orange (40 minutes-1 hour) or red (longer than 1 hour).
You can also click on the specific site, which will give you its dates and times for early voting and whether it has drop box availability.
Best voting times - Forsyth County
Forsyth County also utilizes an interactive map. It will show a pin-drop with the voting site, and like Cobb, the color of the pin will indicate the wait time. Green is for less than 30 minutes, yellow for 30 minutes-1 hour, and red for longer than 1 hour.
Best voting times - Fulton County
Fulton County maintained a wait time map for the last election day, on Nov. 2, 2021. The link to that page is here.
The county does not have an active list of wait times for early voting locations. It's not clear if they will again activate the Election Day map.
Best voting times - DeKalb County
DeKalb does maintain a map with early voting sites, but it does not list out wait times. You can visit that map here.
Additionally, the county has an actively updating tracker of vote totals at each early voting precinct, which may give a sense of how popular/crowded some locations are relative to others.