Paulding County Leads on Election Innovation Study

September 19th, 2023

Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger congratulates Paulding County on their continued leadership in securing Georgia elections. Last May, Paulding County was commended by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) for “Outstanding Innovations in Elections.” In August, Paulding County was selected by the commission as one of the pilot counties to conduct a study on list maintenance practices.

The EAC is conducting a study in accordance with the Help America Vote Act regarding election administration issues, including “[m]ethods of voter registration, maintaining secure and accurate lists of registered voters (including the establishment of a centralized, interactive, statewide voter registration list linked to relevant agencies and all polling sites), and ensuring that registered voters appear on the voter registration list at the appropriate polling site.” Participating jurisdictions will incorporate data from a credit-bureau in order to compare and improve voter registration accuracy, including address matching and comparing voter records to other sources of data.

Secretary Raffensperger congratulated Paulding County’s continued election excellence, stating, “Paulding County is leading on elections, hands down. Thank you to the hard-working public servants, led by their outstanding Election Director Deidre Holden, who continue to innovate and serve their customers – Georgia voters – with top notch effort.”

Click the links for FAQ and more information on the Election Assistance Commission’s study.

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Georgia is recognized as a national leader in elections. It was the first state in the country to implement the trifecta of automatic voter registration, at least 17 days of early voting (which has been called the “gold standard”), and no-excuse absentee voting. Georgia continues to set records for voter turnout and election participation, seeing the largest increase in average turnout of any other state in the 2018 midterm election and record turnout in 2020, and 2022. 2022 achieved the largest single day of in-person early voting turnout in Georgia midterm history utilizing Georgia’s secure, paper ballot voting system. Most recently, Georgia ranked #1 for Election Integrity by the Heritage Foundation, a top ranking for Voter Accessibility by the Center for Election Innovation & Research and tied for number one in Election Administration by the Bipartisan Policy Center.