Some county officials believe that thousands of votes could remain uncounted. County officials, good-government groups and elections experts expressed concern that Georgia’s new system failed to count some mail-in ballots marked with check marks or X’s instead of filled-in ovals. Questions have also emerged about the accuracy of the vote count. “What I experienced was a complete meltdown,” Jacoria Borders, a Fulton County poll worker hired the day before the election, testified at a legislative hearing. And at most polling sites there was only a single scanner, with little apparent regard for the expected turnout. The state deployed little more than one technician per county. Training on the new $107 million system - a Rube Goldbergian assemblage of interrelated components - was widely described as wanting. Raffensperger and his office failed to ensure that hard-pressed counties had adequate equipment or received desperately needed support. With the clock ticking fast toward Primary Day, Mr. With a history of difficulty administering elections, Fulton showed little ability to adjust three months into the pandemic, struggling to process an unprecedented flood of absentee ballots and putting out a frantic call for 250 poll workers just days before in-person voting was held.īut an examination by The New York Times found that in the face of repeated warnings about counties’ readiness for the rollout of the highly complex voting system, Georgia’s top elections official, the secretary of state, remained largely passive. On-the-ground planning deficiencies emerged across the state, though they were far and away direst in Fulton County, the state’s most populous. Next came a barrage of partisan blame-throwing: The Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, accused the liberal-leaning Fulton County, which includes most of Atlanta, of botching the election, while Democratic leaders saw the fiasco as just the latest episode in Republicans’ yearslong effort to disenfranchise the state’s minority voters. It’s not very difficult to figure it out.”Ĭaptured in drone footage, beamed across airwaves and internet, the interminable lines at Atlanta polling sites became an instant and indelible omen of voting breakdown in this pandemic-challenged presidential election year.Įlections workers described a cascade of failures as they struggled to activate and operate Georgia’s new high-tech voting system. “Nobody thought about it, and this is Operations Research 101. “The scanner was the choke point,” he said. Marvin was baffled by what he saw when he finally got inside: a station with 15 to 20 touch screens on which to vote but only a single scanner to process the printed ballots. But on the day of the primary, June 9, he and his wife waited four hours to vote at Park Tavern, an Atlanta restaurant where more than 16,000 voters were consolidated into a single precinct. Marvin had previously lived in Connecticut, where voting was a brisk process measured in minutes. Last month, Daryl Marvin got his first taste of voting in Georgia.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |