Georgia voters on Tuesday chose Penny Brown Reynolds, a Democrat and former Fulton County judge, as secretary of state. She is the first Black woman to hold the office that runs the state’s elections, and the first Democrat to win it in nearly two decades.
With about 93% of the vote counted, Reynolds had 55.6% and a lead of more than 460,000 votes over Republican state Rep. Tim Fleming. Black voters in Georgia have spent the years since 2020 watching the office that counts their ballots become the center of fights over who gets to cast them. They have now put one of their own in charge of it.
The secretary of state oversees voter registration, election administration and the state’s voting infrastructure, along with business filings and professional licences. Reynolds replaces Brad Raffensperger, a Republican who gave up the seat to run for governor this year and lost.
The two candidates offered different pictures of the job. Reynolds campaigned on expanded voting access, restoring public trust and verifiable paper audit trails. Fleming, a former deputy secretary of state under Brian Kemp, ran on tighter election security and stricter guardrails on absentee voting. Absentee ballots are the kind that Georgia Republicans restricted in 2021 with a sweeping election law, in a state where Black voters rely on every option the law leaves them.
The map showed how divided the state remains. Reynolds won Bibb County, home to Macon, with 55,109 votes and a 32.5-point margin. Fleming’s best counties were rural: he won Brantley County by 77.2 points and Banks County by 70.7.
Reynolds’ résumé is a civil rights one. She served as a Fulton County superior and state court judge for nearly 10 years, and in the Biden administration she was a deputy assistant secretary for civil rights at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. She had also been the first Black person to serve as executive counsel to a Georgia governor, under Roy Barnes.
Her win was part of a Democratic sweep of statewide offices that also put Tanya Miller in as attorney general and Keisha Lance Bottoms in the governor’s mansion.
A secretary of state does not write election law. The legislature does, and Georgia’s lawmakers can still make her job harder. But the office decides how the law is applied: how quickly registrations are processed, how voters are told where to go, and what happens when a count is challenged. Those are the decisions that have fallen hardest on Black voters in Georgia, and for the first time in nearly 20 years the person making them ran on opening the door wider.
Reynolds takes office in January 2027. The first test is whether the paper audit trail she promised makes it into the next election budget.
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