A funny thing happened on the way to Georgia’s widely predicted disenfranchisement of its voters: Voter turnout increased.

In last month’s primary elections, turnout was more than 50% higher than in the previous midterm election of 2018. It was very nearly as high as in the 2020 primary, even though presidential primaries tend to attract far more voters. Although that 2020 primary was conducted during a pandemic, it was also the year every registered voter received an absentee ballot request form due to COVID concerns.

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Nineteen-year-old Trent Lehrkamp — who police say was left by three minors at the hospital emergency room covered in spray paint, barely breathing and with a mixture of drugs and alcohol in his system that nearly killed him — is out of the intensive care unit.

Cries for justice rang loudly down Parkwood Avenue on Monday where more than 200 people gathered to pray, show their support and, most of all, to call for arrests to be made in the incident that police say put Trent Lehrkamp in the hospital in critical condition and on a ventilator.