MACON, Ga. — We're now 12 days away from Election Day and we wanted to introduce you to our 13WMAZ political experts who will be on hand during our coverage.
Charles Bullock is a long-time professor of political science at the University of Georgia. Bullock just passed his 50-year mark with the university in 2018.
Charles Richardson is a retired editorial page editor from the Macon Telegraph and is now the artist in residence at Middle Georgia State University.
He's lived in Macon for almost 40 years now.
Clif Wilkinson is a political science professor at Georgia College in Milledgeville. He's been at the school for more than 20 years.
Ahead of the election, we sat down with our panel to discuss what to expect on election night.
We asked each of them when they think we'll have the final results.
"It was like in 2000 where it took weeks before we knew what was gonna happen in Florida , but there have been other contests, other election years, where we didn't know immediately. Back in 1960, they didn't call that for Kennedy until about noon the next day, so it will not be surprising," says Bullock.
"I don't think we'll know exactly until the middle of November. Counting the absentee ballots is a complicated process, you have a Democrat and Republican there as the envelopes are opened, hopefully many states like Georgia will have already processed whether the signatures are correct and that kind of thing," says Richardson.
"Many of those election superintendents and workers will not start counting until election night. It cannot only take a long time to count, but if they don't start until election day and there are overloaded with the number of mail in ballots and absentee ballots, it's simply going to take a long time," says Wilkinson.
We also asked Bullock, Richardson, and Wilkinson their thoughts on how important the 2020 election is and if there's a chance Georgia could be switching from a red to blue state soon. We'll have their answers to these questions leading up to November 3.