There’s an extraordinary new wrinkle in Georgia voting this year, and plenty of Henry Countians are taking advantage of it.

  As of March 24, a staggering 17,712 county residents applied to vote by mail in the 2020 primary. This comes on the heels of an announcement last month by Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to mail an absentee ballot application to every one of the state’s nearly seven million registered voters amid public health concerns due to the COVID-19 situation.

  The Henry County number was reported by Clayton Carte in his Moving Henry Forward blog, and Carte cited data analyst Ryan Anderson and his Georgia Votes website, which has a large following among Georgia politicos.

  A call to the Henry County elections office to confirm the number was not returned by press time. Anderson uses publicly available data from the Secretary of State’ office to compile his information.

  Three-fourths of those who have applied by mail for absentee ballots are over the age of 50, and more than 44 percent are 65 or over, according to the Georgia Votes website. There are no age requirements or other reasons needed to cast an absentee ballot in Georgia.

  The number of applications so far has surpassed the 17,637 absentee votes cast in 2016, Carte noted, and of those only 525 ballots were received by mail.

  Raffensperger’s decision to mail applications to all state voters was “to protect the public health of Georgia voters while also upholding the integrity of the vote,” according to a statement from his office.

  The move suggests a possible upswing in voter turnout in Henry County, as nearly 17 percent (13,069) of applicants did not vote in the 2016 primary, according to Anderson’s analysis.

  So far the applications are fairly closely divided among parties. Requests for Democratic ballots for the primary totaled 49.6 percent (8,786) while 47.4 percent of the applications (8,452) specified Republican ballots. Another 474 voters asked for non-partisan ballots.

  The 2020 presidential preference primary originally scheduled for March 24 and the general primary set for May 19 were both postponed to June 9, with the primary runoff to follow August 11. The voter registration deadline for the primary is May 11.