Early Voting Turnout Lags Among Downtown Athens Residents
Advance voting for the 2026 midterm elections in Athens-Clarke County came to a close on Oct. 30, and voters who live in Downtown Athens have voted the least out of the 14 registered Athens neighborhoods and historic districts examined by Grady Newsource reporters.
Eleven out of 111 registered Downtown voters had cast their vote as of Oct. 29, despite the downtown’s population of 606, according to Georgia voter absentee files.
Downtown Athens is a primarily business area, and its residents are mainly college students, which could play a part in low voter turnout.
“With us being a younger generation, it is good to actually look into what you’re voting for,” said Frances Thrasher, an Athens native and upperclassman at the University of Georgia. “And a lot of people, I guess, don’t do that, so that might be why they’re not voting.”
Grace Niolon-Kachur, a Downtown resident and a fourth-year interior design student at UGA, said she grew up in Atlanta, but her parents bought a house in Athens, so she changed her address.
Niolon-Kachur voted in Athens-Clarke County for the first time at UGA’s Tate Student Center on Oct. 27. The Tate Student Center was open for advance voting from Oct. 27-29.
Athens-Clarke County Mayor Kelly Girtz said even though many college students live in Athens, the majority of the year, most students retain voter registration in their home county.
“You’re having to navigate your social life and your academic life and, you know, do career planning,” Girtz said. “So I think voter registration tends to take a backseat among that buffet of things.”
Girtz speculated that if they made time to register locally, students could have a massive impact on both local and national elections.
“I think you’re less likely to vote generally just because you’ve got, sorta of, this split identity where a piece of your identity that’s rooted in the place that you’re not sleeping every night,” Girtz said. “If you could much more consistently get people to register here, I think you would see that the student population generally would cast more votes.”
The choice not to vote in Athens is deliberate for some students. Candidates or local issues in a student’s hometown can be a reason not to change where they’re registered.
“I like voting for the people back where I live,” said Jackson Pledger, a Downtown resident and second-year international affairs major at UGA.
You know, I like fighting the good fight over there.”
Although voters disagree about whether students should choose to vote back home instead of in Athens, Thrasher said students being away from home is not an excuse not to vote. She recommends students take a day to vote in their home county or register to vote in Athens-Clarke County to save traveling time.
Georgia is a known swing state, which is a factor in statewide advance voting turnout during the midterm elections.
“My mom is a really big advocate of voting and she always tells me, especially people our age, that we love to think that our voice doesn’t matter and that one vote isn’t going to change the election, but it will,” Niolon-Kachur said.
Editor’s Note: A surge in advance voting, more than 2.45 million in-person voters as of Oct. 30, 2026, broke previous Georgia records for midterm elections. Reporting II students examined voter registration files and advance voting data for the 2026 midterm elections from the Georgia Secretary of State’s office for Athens-Clarke County to produce a series of stories in a project led by Lori Johnston, journalism senior lecturer, and Mark Niesse, Fink Visiting Professional, a former voting and democracy reporter for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution who now is a freelancer for the AJC, Capitol Beat and PeachPol.
