High voter turnout caused long lines for the first day of early voting in Georgia. NBC News reported one voter in Cobb County, Everlean Rutherford, waited in line for 9 hours and 39 minutes to cast her vote.

Though she began her wait upbeat and excited about the turnout, hours later, she tweeted, ‘I went from 'yay love seeing all these people early voting' to 'I’ve been here over four hours, hungry and ready to go'...

...Yeah this is voter suppression. It should never take this long to vote. Especially early voting.’ Local officials said that the waits across the state were due to high volume of turnout rather than any issues with the machines.

Some of the counties with the longest reported lines also have high non-white populations, in line with research from 2019 which found that race is one of the strongest predictors of how long one must wait in line to vote.

Researchers from UCLA, Carnegie Mellon University, and the University of Chicago used cellphone data to ‘quantify a racial disparity in voting wait times across a nationwide sample of polling places’ during the 2016 election.

They found that ‘relative to entirely-white neighborhoods, residents of entirely-Black neighborhoods waited 29% longer to vote and were 74% more likely to spend more than 30 minutes at their polling place.’

Similarly, a 2017 report from Stephen Pettigrew of the University of Pennsylvania found that ‘nonwhite voters are seven times more likely than white voters to wait in line for more than an hour to vote.’

Pettigrew concluded that the reason is because more resources, including polling workers and voting machines, are provided to mostly white neighborhoods.