Georgia primary blighted by long lines and broken voting machines

Georgia voters immediately encountered hours-long lines and equipment malfunctions as they showed up to vote in person in the state’s primary races on Tuesday. Today is the latest high-stakes test of whether a state can hold an election during the Covid-19 pandemic. 

Tuesday also marked the first time Georgia was using new voting equipment, and voters reported malfunctions on Tuesday morning. The Atlanta mayor, Keisha Lance Bottoms, tweeted that at some precincts no machines were working.

Voters snaked around the parking lot of the Lions Club community center in Cobb county, where many said around noon that they had been waiting in line for two to three hours. At least half of the voters appeared to be wearing masks, and some voters carried umbrellas to shield themselves from the sun.

Chloe Mexile Benard, 33, said she had been waiting since 7.30am to vote. She reached the front of the line around noon, cheering as she was finally ushered in by a volunteer. She came to vote for the presidential primary, but also to choose the county commissioner and county sheriff, she said. 

Asked why she didn’t vote with a mail-in ballot, Benard, whose T-shirt said “Dreams don’t expire,” said she doesn’t trust them. “I requested it. I received it, but I don’t trust anybody,” she said. “I don’t trust them to count it.” 

Benard said there were just two voting machines at the station when she arrived. Then, “two more appeared, magically,” she said. Geraldine Aldridge, a polling manager at the site, said seven machines including one for handicapped voters, were working at noon. 

Amid the equipment failures, some voters in Atlanta were being told to vote on back-up provisional ballots, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported. But at least one precinct told the paper that they did not have access to provisional ballots. 

The problems in Georgia add to mounting concerns over whether states are prepared to hold elections in November. Like many other states, Georgia encouraged voters to cast their ballot by mail, but was plagued by delays in getting voters ballots and still saw extremely long lines at the polls. Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Washington DC have all seen similar problems in their recent primaries.

In Fulton county, Simone Alisa, 66, said she requested a mail-in ballot but never received one. Two voters in line next to her said they did not receive their ballots either. Alisa said she waited for close to three hours to cast her vote for the presidential primary, district attorney and state court judges. 

“This isn’t normal,” said Alisa, who says she has voted in Fulton county for the past 10 years. She said she has never waited for more than 30 minutes to cast her ballot.

By November, Alisa hopes to see improvements. “Either we receive our absentee ballot,” she said. “By that time, I would think we can have more people facilitate the voting.” 

On their way out of the Central Park Recreation Center, where the voting took place, Ashraf and Laurel Hussain, 37 and 48, said they had waited four and a half hours before entering the building. The pair said they were worried about the coronavirus after seeing that none of the touchscreens used to cast votes were sanitized by poll workers.

The pair said they had requested mail-in ballots in late April, but never received them.

“We wanted to avoid having to interact in the Covid situation, but unfortunately we were kind of forced to,” Ashraf said.

Like other voters, they said they were grateful for the volunteers (some of whom were candidates themselves) offering bottled water and snacks to those standing in line.

“From a local level, they’re doing everything they can do. But it seems like they weren’t necessarily given the tools to do what they needed to do,” said Ashraf. 

Polling hours were extended until 9pm in Fulton county and until 8pm at several locations in Cobb county because of issues Tuesday, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Some polling places will also have extended hours in Gwinnett, Muscogee, and Chatham counties.

Vice-President Joe Biden’s campaign released a statement Tuesday afternoon calling the meltdown in Georgia “unacceptable”.

“Free and fair elections are the cornerstone of our democracy. What we see in Georgia today, from significant issues with voting machines to breakdowns in the delivery of ballots to voters who requested to vote absentee, are a threat to those values,” Rachana Desai Martin, the campaign’s voter protection director, said in a statement.

Elections officials across the state consolidated polling locations as they faced poll worker shortages. More than 10% of polling locations throughout Georgia have been relocated because of the pandemic, forcing upwards of 10,000 voters to be reassigned to new locations.

Georgia’s presidential primary was originally supposed to take place in March, but has been twice delayed because of Covid-19. Brad Raffensperger, the state’s top election official, encouraged people to vote by mail, and an unprecedented 1.5 million Georgians requested absentee ballots for the election. But some counties reported severe delays in processing the requests and some voters in the state reported never receiving the ballots they requested, forcing them to go to the polls to vote in person. 

The absentee ballot delays and polling consolidations created a toxic mix for voters, resulting in long lines. Some voters reported waiting upwards of four hours to vote on Friday in Atlanta, the final day of early voting there. 

Yolanda Pryor-Glenn, a 52-year old retiree, said she came to vote for the Cobb county superior court seat which is up for grabs. Pryor-Glenn said the long-lines and lack of resources deployed at the polling station seemed like “a different version of suppression”. 

“Why were there only four machines when you could have had 10?,” she said. “Do better, Georgia,” Benard said. 

Raffensperger told the Washington Post many of the problems appeared to be focused in Fulton county, which includes Atlanta and its suburbs. And at least seven polling locations in the Atlanta metro area did not open on time, said Seth Bringman, a spokesman for Fair Fight Action, the voting rights group started by Stacey Abrams.

Raffensperger’s office blamed the delays on human error.

“So far we have no reports of any actual equipment issues. We do have reports of equipment being delivered to the wrong locations and delivered late. We have reports of poll workers not understanding setup or how to operate voting equipment,” Gabriel Sterling, the chief operating officer for the secretary of state’s office said in a statement Tuesday morning. “While these are unfortunate, they are not issues of the equipment but a function of counties engaging in poor planning, limited training, and failures of leadership. Well over 2,000 precincts are functioning normally throughout the state of Georgia.” 

Hours later, Raffensperger released his own statement focusing on problems in two Atlanta-area counties in the state. The Associated Press reported that the problems were not confined to those areas.

“The voting situation today in certain precincts in Fulton and Dekalb counties is unacceptable. My office has opened an investigation to determine what these counties need to do to resolve these issues before November’s election,” Raffensperger said.

“Obviously, the first time a new voting system is used there is going to be a learning curve, and voting in a pandemic only increased these difficulties. But every other county faced these same issues and were significantly better prepared to respond so that voters had every opportunity to vote.”

Stacey Abrams, the 2018 Democratic nominee for governor in Georgia, harshly criticized Raffensperger Tuesday evening for blaming counties and said he was abdicating his responsibility as the state’s top election official.

“It is not sufficient to say that the county you live in determines the quality of your democracy,” she said.

Abrams said she had requested her absentee ballot in May, but was unable to vote with it because the return envelope arrived sealed shut. After unsuccessfully trying to steam it open, she said she went to vote in person on Tuesday. Abrams said Fair Fight, the voting rights group she leads, would soon bring litigation against the state for the way it handled the election, and cautioned Republican efforts to suppress voting rights would only increase as November approached.

In addition to Georgia, Nevada, South Carolina, West Virginia and North Dakota are all holding primaries on Tuesday.