Georgia’s primary election got off to a rocky start on Tuesday, plagued by serious problems with new computerized voting machines that state officials blamed on poll workers.
But the problems were far greater and more widespread than could be easily explained — with ominous implications for the Nov. 3 general election.
“Lines snaked out the doors, some polling locations didn’t open on time, and others had no working voting machines in several counties in the first hours of voting,” the Washington Post reported.
The Post called the situation “a potential preview of how new voting procedures brought on by the coronavirus pandemic could affect the presidential election in November.”
Criticism of President Trump’s response to the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests following George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis “has added fuel to Democrats’ ambitions of winning in Georgia, where Republicans dominate statewide elections,” reported the Associated Press.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that “hundreds” of poll workers in the Atlanta area had quit for fear of contracting the virus.
Compounding the problems, poll workers who remained on the job “complained they were being being trained on the job after being hired at the last minute.”
“This was supposed to be seamless, and today nothing is working,” Marilyn McGuire, a precinct manager in Stone Mountain GA, told the Journal-Constitution.
“Today’s been a disaster. People are mad. They’ve been waiting for hours. It’s hard to talk about it’s so frustrating. But at least people are staying — they’re not going anywhere.”
And indeed, voters did stay, waiting wearily in line for hours in some places.
But some on Twitter said the lines that really counted were political.
One tweet suggested that white conservatives were “doing it with surgical precision,” allocating resources so “it’s a 5-minute breeze-through in conservative precincts but a 5-hour slog in Democratic ones.”
Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms tweeted her own concerns Tuesday morning after reports that several majority black polling places had no working machines.
“PLEASE do not allow your vote to be suppressed,” Bottoms wrote.
“Voters in the Atlanta area reported arriving before polls opened and standing in line for hours, with election officials processing ballots painfully slowly because they couldn’t get new touch screen machines to work,” the Post says.
Fulton County Commissioner Liz Hausmann said it took her 2 hours and 40 minutes to vote. Fulton County includes Atlanta.
Hausman told the Journal-Constitution “she’d never seen a line so long — even for a presidential election.”
A long-time poll manager couldn’t figure out how to insert the cards that record votes into the machines, Hausman said. It turned out the cards were upside down, “which took poll workers an hour to figure out.”
Georgia was one of five states holding primaries on Tuesday. The others — Nevada, North Dakota, South Carolina and West Virginia — reported few voting issues. All five states have projected they will receive record numbers of vote-by-mail ballots.
