ATLANTA — After what seemed like a never ending political season in Georgia, the state's highest election official is calling on lawmakers for change.
Georgia is one of the few states in the country that still has runoffs. A week after the U.S. Senate runoff between Raphael Warnock and Herschel Walker, Sec. of State Brad Raffensperger is calling on the General Assembly to end that process for general elections.
The General Assembly convenes in January and could decide from several different options, Raffensperger's office said. They did not provide examples of what the changes could look like.
“No one wants to be dealing with politics in the middle of their family holiday,” said Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. “It’s even tougher on the counties who had a difficult time completing all of their deadlines, an election audit and executing a runoff in a four-week time period.”
The Secretary of State's office tells 11Alive if the general election runoff was eliminated, elections would likely be won by one of two ways. The first is plurality- where whoever gets the most votes, wins.
"Someone gets 48 and someone gets 47 -- we call that a winner and a loser," Gwinnett County Elections Supervisor Zach Manifold said.
Another option is ranked-choice voting -- where voters rank the candidates by first, second, and third choice. An advocate of this voting option is Chase Oliver, the Libertarian Senate candidate in November.
Then if a race is too close to call they can eliminate the last place candidate and those voters' second choice is already on record.
"We've been doing a pilot program with this election and our overseas and uniformed overseas voters --they got ranked ballots," Manifold explained.
Manifold calls it a win-win for all those involved.
Georgia's 2022 midterms shattered previous turnout records.
"It's like you're almost there and then you have to start all over again," Manifold said. He added general election runoffs can often mean 80-hour workdays for his staff and can cost their county alone $1 million.
In Georgia, candidates for statewide offices must get 50% + 1 of the vote to be declared the winner. If that doesn't happen, the top two candidates square off again in a runoff. In most states, the candidate with a plurality of votes is declared the winner.
The state began using the runoff system in the 1960s after the Supreme Court knocked down the state’s county unit system. It was Georgia’s version of the Electoral College and gave a great deal of power to rural areas of the state.
News happens fast. Download our 11Alive News app for all the latest breaking updates, and sign up for our Speed Feed newsletter to get a rundown of the latest headlines across north Georgia.