Georgia

Majority rule applies to general elections, not just primaries — a 49.9% November lead is not a win, it's a ticket to December 1. The runoff is legally a continuation: no new registration, party locks carry over, and overseas voters cast ranked ballots in advance. A plurality model calls races Georgia hasn't finished.

After 2024's refusals, the rules changed: certification is a mandatory ministerial duty (affirmed on appeal July 2025), and the State Election Board's hand-count and certification-discretion rules were struck by the state Supreme Court in June 2025. A model bracing for certification standoffs is modeling the last war.

Bartow, Bleckley, Chattooga, Murray, Pulaski, Towns, and Union vest all county legislative and executive power in a single elected sole commissioner — the only such governments in the nation. A board-shaped county model invents colleagues who don't exist.

Each county's board of elections is created by its own legislation — appointed by parties here, the commission there, grand juries and judges elsewhere — and the legislature rewrites individual boards by local act, as the 2021 restructuring wave showed. The last probate-judge-run counties were converted by statute effective January 2025.

Judicial races are nonpartisan and decided at the May primary, not November. But the bench really turns over by appointment: a resignation timed within six months of an election cancels it, the governor fills the seat, and the appointee runs later as an incumbent — eight of nine justices arrived that way. Probate judges, meanwhile, still run partisan in November — unless this year's Amendment 3 passes.

Columbus, Athens, Augusta, and Macon merged with their counties — leaving excluded towns like Hephzibah and Winterville inside — and four small counties unified too, including Echols, whose county seat simply disincorporated. 159 counties yield 152 county governments, and the Census codes the mergers as municipal.

No party registration exists, but which party's primary you pulled is recorded in the voter history file and published by the state — and the runoff is a continuation, so a May Democratic ballot locks you out of June's Republican runoff. Affiliation is inferable, official, and downloadable.

The five Public Service Commissioners are elected statewide with district residency requirements — a method that froze elections for three years under VRA litigation until the Eleventh Circuit upheld it. The delayed makeup elections in 2025 swept in two Democrats; control of the commission rides on this year's two seats.