GA early voting tops 1.1M as Jackson & Bottoms poll tied

I want to take you now to our Rabun County, where we are seeing live pictures just coming into the newsroom as we speak of Georgia gubernatorial candidate Rick Jackson. He is speaking right now. It's a meet and greet with voters as part of a series of campaign stops across North Georgia, including Murray and Gordon counties. Let's see if we can listen in. Thank you. The cost of living in the last five years has gone up 23 percent, but I don't know if you know this the average property taxes have gone up 49 percent almost 10 percent a year hopefully you guys are a lot better shaped than than some of the other counties maybe not but the point is is that so I've gone all over Georgia to find out what's going on here and everybody's blaming everybody so I came up with the approach we had to be careful at the state not to have one suit fits all. We have 159 counties that tax totally different. You know, some of them don't have sales tax they can pass. Some of them do. Some use property taxes and other things. And so, I wanted to be careful to not hurt our counties or hurt to control their counties. But, here's what I've come up with. Number one, my approach is that your taxes will never go up because the valuation of your home ever again. Okay? As a business person, I found that the solution to most problems is identifying the problem. So it was bizarre to me when I got to thinking about it that let's say all of our valuations of our homes go up, and that's $2 million worth of taxes. It was bizarre that that $2 million would decide what the budget was. If we ran the state like that, Brian Kemp would have been voted out of office a long time ago. It's just all the money comes in, you just spend it. And, you know, that's what liberals do. Well, they actually spend more than money comes in, but that's a different thing. So my approach is that the counties have control of the budget. They decide, they publicize what the budget is. If they want to go up 2%, 3%, 4%, whatever, that's up to them. But everybody will be able to justify, well, how come we got to build this? How come we got to do that? How come the, you know, school is going to go up 20%, whatever the issue is. I just wanted to create accountability. So that's my approach, and I think if we do that, there's no way county commissioners will be reelected if they go up 10% a year, I can guarantee you. So the next thing is health care. I know health care, and I will guarantee that we will have the most cost-effective state plan in the country at the end of the first term. Let me give you just a couple of things that I'll do. And instead of, you know, saying Medicaid expansion, that actually would cost us $3 or $4 billion a year. My opponent didn't understand how health care works. I actually do. But that's a different issue. We will expand coverage to make sure everybody's covered. That's not going to be an issue. We're just going to do it intelligently. The next thing we're going to do is have y'all ever gone to a hospital and answered the same questions three times before you actually got? Yeah. All right. So we're going to have technology that you can have access to. So you have been listening to one of the campaign stops for Republican gubernatorial nominee Rick Jackson. He's up in Rabun County right now speaking with voters. It's part of a kind of a wide reaching type of stops today over multiple different areas and counties, including Murray and Gordon counties. I do want to mention that he is going against Keisha Lance Bottoms, a Democratic nominee for governor. And so there was just a brand new Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll that came out that finds the Georgia governor's race nearly tied with independent voters up for grabs. So that's obviously why they're going to be going around the state over the next two weeks trying to get those independent voters who have yet to make up their minds. Republican Rick Jackson leads Democrat Keisha Lance Bottoms 46 to 45 within the poll's margin of error. So independents favor Bottoms by five points, but 18 percent have not chosen a candidate yet. Jackson has a major fundraising advantage, while Bottoms is campaigning as President Donald Trump's approval rating sits at just 41 percent. It's elections obviously going on right now. We'll be monitoring this. And I also want to talk about early voting numbers. So earlier today, we talked with the secretary of state during a Fox 5 News live at 11 o'clock. And obviously he was super excited about what we're seeing in terms of voting. And so you're looking at the numbers on your screen. Georgia continues to surge past one million ballots submitted for early voting since it started on October 13th. The Secretary of State's office says more than 1.1 million ballots have been cast in person. I'll tell you those numbers just keep climbing by the minute and more than 55,000 absentee ballots have already been accepted. Voters who are white and female, along with those in the 65 to 69 age group, continue to outpace their counterparts when it comes to turnout and i will say it's very nice the secretary of state's office has a whole dashboard that you can actually go see where people are voting what counties what type of people are voting as well so it's a very cool dashboard and we'll obviously try to link that for you on our website fox5atlanta.com and speaking of voting there are going to be some constitutional amendments on the ballot as well and so Georgia voters will see three proposed amendments. Amendment one asks about a tax break for farmers and timber growers. Amendment two would require all probate court judges in Georgia to be elected in nonpartisan elections. And Amendment three would allow state lawmakers to create a special next generation 9-11 fund. So obviously, there's a lot at stake here, lots of different things on the ballot. Remember, early voting ends next Friday. We'll obviously keep you up to date on how we're doing. But when I checked yesterday, more than 15 percent of the state's population who are registered to vote have already taken that opportunity to do so.