Twenty five million Americans have so far casted their votes at the ongoing United States presidential elections, according to a tally by the election Lab at the university of Florida.
Reports say, of the 25 million early votes that have been cast so far, just under 10,000 were through in-person voting and almost 15,000 others were via mail-in ballots.
Meanwhile, a review of 8.2 millions registered voters in Georgia has found just 20 non-citizens who were registered to vote – and only nine of them ever cast a ballot.
READ ALSO: CSO’s to Petition Against Justice Amobeda Over Alleged Jeopardizing Peace, Security of Kano
The findings, announced by Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, underscore how rare it is for people who are not US citizens to register to vote.
Trump has repeatedly claimed that non-citizen voting is a serious problem in the US and source of large-scale election fraud – a claim experts have rejected, Aljazeera media network report.
It’s illegal for non-citizens to vote and those who register to do so risk incarceration or deportation.
The registrations for the 20 noncitizens in Georgia were cancelled, and they were referred to law enforcement for further investigation, Raffensperger said.
“One of the reasons the secretary ordered this non citizenship audit is to prove to people that, while there are ways that some can potentially get on, it is ceasingly rare,” a spokesperson for Raffensperger’s office said.
In the same vein, one of the battle ground state is Georgia which was described as one of the determinant in winning the election.
Georgia, with its 16 Electoral College votes, is one of seven key battleground states which could lean either Democrat or Republican this election cycle.
In 2020, Biden became the first Democrat to win the state since 1992, a victory largely attributed to a huge uptick in votes by Black residents, who account for about one-third of Georgia’s population.
But, Biden won with a narrow margin — just 11,779 votes — and the state became a focal point of Trump’s campaign to overturn the 2020 election results.
The Republican infamously pressured Georgia’s top election official to “find” more votes, and he actively spread misinformation that the tally was marred by election fraud.
Trump was later charged with election interference in the state, in an ongoing case.
Georgia has recorded record early voting turnout so far in this year’s election.
In another development, the two US presidential candidates have been crisscrossing Pennsylvania over the past few weeks, highlighting the importance their respective campaigns are placing on winning the state.
According to a New York Times aggregate of recent election polls, Trump and Harris are “essentially tied” at 48 percent support each in Pennsylvania.
With its 19 Electoral College votes, Pennsylvania could prove critical in determining the winner of the November 5 vote.
Source: Aljazeera