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By Sonam Sheth
Evening Politics Editor
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Former President Jimmy Carter made headlines this week after his grandson confirmed he cast an absentee ballot in Georgia for the 2024 U.S. election.
The news begs a particular, if somewhat crass, question in this era of early voting: what happens if Carter, who turned 100 this month, dies before Election Day? Would his vote count?
Georgia law doesn't explicitly say whether absentee ballots are counted if the voter passes away before Election Day. But the Georgia secretary of state's office says it accepts ballots in such cases.
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"An absentee by mail ballot has been cast the moment the voter mails it," a spokesperson for the office told Newsweek. "If the voter dies after mailing their ballot, but before Election Day, their vote will still count."
The reason why likely comes down to how election administration works in the state, said Andrew Garber, counsel on the Voting Rights and Elections team at the Brennan Center for Justice.
Georgia has around two weeks of ballot pre-processing, which, as the name suggests, allows election workers to begin processing ballots before Election Day.
"That way, by the time Election Day rolls around, all the mail ballots that were sent in have been pre-processed and removed from their sealed envelopes. That means election workers can't really identify anymore which ballot came in when, and who sent it in," Garber told Newsweek. "That's a good thing, because it protects the privacy of the voter."
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That said, Georgia has a "challenge law" that lets individuals challenge an absentee ballot before 5:00 p.m. on the day before scanning and tabulation.
That means that "if someone died after voting absentee and became the subject of a challenge, that could be a way to throw out the vote," a representative for Fair Fight Action, a Georgia-based voting rights organization, told Newsweek.
Early voting in Georgia kicked off on Tuesday, with a record number of ballots — 415,688 — being cast on the first day.
Jason Carter, who is Jimmy Carter's grandson and the chairman of the Carter Center, told The New York Times that the former president's absentee ballot was dropped off in a dropbox on Wednesday. The Carter Center said that in doing so, Carter fulfilled his wish to live long enough to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris.
The rules governing the counting of absentee ballots in the event that the voter dies before Election Day vary on a state-by-state basis.
According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 10 states have laws that explicitly allow for absentee ballots to be counted if the person who cast them dies before the election. Connecticut law permits it only if the deceased was a member of the armed services.
Nine states — including the battleground states of Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — have laws that prohibit counting an absentee ballot if the person who cast it dies before Election Day, per the NCSL.
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