Georgia Betrays Its Voters Again - The New Yorker

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In many parts of Atlanta, on Tuesday, lines to vote in the state’s primary elections were exceedingly long, and some voting machines were not working.Photograph by John Bazemore / AP / Shutterstock

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In November of 2018, Alyssa Thys, a twenty-nine-year-old communications manager in Atlanta, waited in line for more than two hours to vote for Stacey Abrams, at her precinct in a working-class, predominantly black neighborhood. Thys, to whom I spoke at the time, called the experience “complete chaos and disorganization.” She returned to the same place, Pittman Park Recreation Center, on Tuesday, to vote in the primaries. (In the most high-profile race, seven Democrats, including Jon Ossoff, are running for the opportunity to unseat Georgia’s senior Republican senator, David Perdue, in November.) “Like, wow,” Thys, who is white, told me after another frustrating morning. “Nothing has been learned.” She’d arrived early again—at 6:45 a.m., fifteen minutes before polls opened—and there was a line “down the block,” she told me, lengthened by social distancing. A few dozen would-be voters were already queued up ahead of her. “People thought they didn’t have the correct number of machines again,” she said. As it turned out, there were more machines than two years ago—eight working machines, Thys believed, rather than the three on site in 2018. But they’re new machines, which require printing out completed paper ballots and placing them in a secured box. “They just didn’t have any of that paper that was supposed to be printed,” Thys said, “which is, like, half of the entire system meant to prevent election fraud.”

After her frustrating experience in 2018, Thys filed a complaint noting the various issues she’d encountered, which included—as she’d written on a form—disorganized poll workers, no provisional ballots available, and issues with the touch screens. “The response I got,” Thys told me, “was that, basically, the state had nothing to do with it and the county election officials were responsible for the staffing and supplies at each precinct—which, honestly, just feels like they’re trying to pass the buck. It comes from the top.” At the top is Governor Brian Kemp, a Republican who, as secretary of state, in 2018, oversaw his own race against Abrams. Kemp won by some fifty-five thousand votes, amid widespread allegations that Republicans worked to limit turnout. “Like me, my neighbors think it’s voter suppression again,” Thys said. “That’s what I heard in line.” She shared a video she’d taken of a black fellow-voter. Almost an hour into Tuesday’s voting delays, he stepped out and addressed the crowd, offering useful information. “They say that they’ve escalated this particular issue to the Secretary of State’s office,” he said. “But we know how that goes. So what we need you to do in the meantime—because this is what we call voter suppression—we need you all to call election-protection hotline.” He read the number twice. “You may get a voice mail when you call,” he went on. “Please leave a message.”

Shortly after eight o’clock, the polling location finally opened, an hour behind schedule. “While folks waited,” Thys said, “they didn’t offer provisional ballots, so we could record our votes and leave.” She added, “That’s a huge issue for most people. I’m in a relatively privileged position, with a corporate job. If I needed to be there for eight hours, I could’ve been.”

A neighbor of hers, Zakiya Mims, was also experiencing déjà vu. A twenty-nine-year-old financial planner in Fulton County, Mims, who is black, grew up in the wealthier, more conservative East Cobb community, in Cobb County. “I had great voter experiences there,” Mims said. In Fulton County, where she now lives and where she first voted in 2017, she described a notably different experience: a lack of machines and insufficient access for the elderly and disabled. She e-mailed her concerns about this to the entire Fulton County Board of Elections two years ago. Their eventual explanation—that they didn’t have enough machines—didn’t make sense to her. “My whole thing,” she told me, “is you have voting machines sitting in a warehouse!” (There were, in fact, hundreds of machines locked in warehouses, as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported at the time, owing to a federal lawsuit over whether the machines were susceptible to tampering.)

Mims told me that she e-mailed the Fulton County Board of Elections again, last week, worried about the same thing recurring. An official, in response, noted that delays would be expected once more, owing to the coronavirus pandemic and expected high voter turnout. “Nowhere in there does she say the machines are not gonna have tape in them,” Mims said, “and they’re not gonna have been tested on site.” On Tuesday, Mims arrived at the Pittman Park precinct at six-fifteen, becoming the second in line, and waited for it to open at 7 A.M., as scheduled. “It was 8:07 before anyone walked into the building,” she said. Mims sent e-mails and made calls to election officials whose voice-mail boxes were full. “I get that we’re in the middle of COVID-19 and there are new machines,” she told me. “But if they get on the news and say this went smooth, like in 2018,” she went on, “this is why there’s voter suppression. You guys had enough money to have the National Guard out to stand against protesters, but you couldn’t use the National Guard to test the machines on site?”

Elsewhere in Atlanta, as Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms noted on Twitter, precinct lines were exceedingly long, and some machines were not working. “Is this happening across the county, or just on the South End?” Bottoms wrote. The problems appeared to be widespread across both Fulton and Dekalb counties, which comprise much of the Atlanta metropolitan area. Kate Whitney, a thirty-one-year-old design researcher, also arrived early at her polling location, the West Oakland Missionary Baptist Church, in a poor part of Fulton County. She’d requested an absentee ballot—because her father is ill and she worried about exposure to the coronavirus—but never received one. At her polling location, there were three poll workers also dealing with problems, which delayed voting until around nine o’clock. “When you put the new cards in the machine,” Whitney said, “it would say that the data was invalid on the card.” In the first two hours, Whitney told me, eight people, at most, were successfully able to vote. Volunteers brought chairs outside to encourage people to stay, but, Whitney said, “we’d already lost a significant number as the day got hotter and people had to get to work.” She clocked in an hour late, but, like Thys, this did not put her employment in real jeopardy. “I can do my work at a lag time,” she said, “which is a luxury.” Whitney spoke to an emergency responder who’d just finished a sixteen-hour shift on an ambulance. “She’d arrived to vote before going to bed and then getting up again tonight to work another extended shift. She stuck it out, but many did not.” The whole experience was markedly different from her last one, two years ago, when Whitney, who is white, lived and voted in a wealthier part of the city. “We always had enough voting machines, stations, and workers,” she said. As for her new polling location and its workers, she said, “they were doing their best, but didn’t have the support, the infrastructure, or resources they needed—they didn’t even have a ton of pens.” She went on, “Because it’s a poorer, smaller, predominantly black area, that doesn’t feel like a mistake.”

State officials dissembled. “While these issues are unfortunate,” Gabriel Sterling, a statewide voting-implementation manager, told a local TV station, “they are not issues of the equipment but a function of counties engaging in poor planning, limited training, and failures of leadership.” Kemp’s successor as secretary of state, the Republican Brad Raffensperger, echoed this message. In a statement, Raffensperger called the issues “unacceptable” and announced that he’d launched an investigation to “determine what these counties need to do to resolve these issues before November’s election.” He went on, “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.”

This kind of thinking did not sit well with county officials. “It’s astounding to me what an abdication of leadership that is,” Steve Bradshaw, a Dekalb County commissioner, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “to push the ownership down to the counties. I was raised that if you mess up, ’fess up.”

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