Ballots without drama
Low turnout seen at polls with increased mail-in votes
WASHINGTON — Voters trickled to the polls with no wait times and election workers began processing a crush of absentee ballots with no major difficulties Tuesday in a slew of primaries and runoffs across five states, a sign of the extra preparations states have taken to hold elections during the coronavirus pandemic.
The contests in Georgia, Connecticut, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Vermont drew much lower turnout than previous elections this year, which contributed to the relative quiet. But Georgia and Wisconsin, in particular, rolled out new safeguards to avoid the chaos of primaries earlier this year in those two states, which were marked by polling-place closures, poll-worker no-shows and equipment difficulties for staff members who were not properly trained amid fears of coronavirus infection.
“We all saw the stories in April, and we all decided that can’t happen again,” said Dori Frankel Steigman, a poll worker at Barack Obama High School in Milwaukee, one of 170 polling locations open on Tuesday, compared with just five for the state’s April 7 spring primary.
Election officials warned that Tuesday’s successes are no guarantee that Nov. 3, when tens of millions more voters are expected to turn out, will unfold as smoothly. It also was too early to say how long various counties would take to complete their count of mail ballots, and what that might signal about the fall.
In Georgia, a high-profile runoff for district attorney drew strong interest in the Atlanta area, where, during the June primary, many voters did not receive mail ballots, poll workers struggled to operate new machines and voters waited in hours-long lines.
“Back in June, the covid-19 got to everything,” said Regina Waller, a spokeswoman for Fulton County, Ga. “We weren’t fully prepared. We lost sites, we lost workers because of it. This time we’re prepared.”
On Tuesday, one of the hardest-hit precincts in the June primary, Park Tavern in midtown Atlanta, had no wait times. “I’m surprised I’m the first one here,” said Sarah Andrews, 42, a technician who trains machine operators and who voted at Park Tavern just after polls opened. “I came here early, thinking there would lines.”
Fulton County also set up a cavernous ballot-counting facility at State Farm Arena, home of the Atlanta Hawks basketball team. Beneath high-hanging basketball hoops, about 70 election workers sat two to a table and followed a three-step process for each ballot, creating stacks for the outer and inner envelopes as well as the ballots themselves. Ralph Jones, Fulton’s registration chief, said the crew had processed 20,000 ballots by Monday, with 10,000 expected by the end of Tuesday.
A similar office space in Milwaukee hosted that city’s central ballot-counting operation. About 200 masked and distanced workers assembled under fluorescent lights to begin processing all ballots cast early, whether by mail or in person.
Aside from the steady whir of election scanners reading ballots, the work was quiet and efficient, with workers raising a hand when they encountered a problem and observers from both major parties watching from a distance, ready to challenge ballot rejections. By midmorning, very few ballots had been rejected, said Democratic observer Mike DeBruin.
“I’m impressed by what I’m seeing,” DeBruin said. Two Democrats and three Republicans were on hand; the Republicans, who appeared to be college-age, said they were not authorized to comment.
Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota on Tuesday survived a stiff Democratic primary challenge, defeating Antone Melton-Meaux, an attorney and mediator who raised a staggering $3.2 million last quarter from Omar critics around the nation.
In 2018, Omar became one of the first two Muslim women elected to Congress, building on a national profile that started when the onetime refugee from Somalia was elected to the Minnesota Legislature just two years earlier. Her aggressive advocacy on liberal issues, and her eagerness to take on Donald Trump, made her even more prominent.
In a primary runoff for an open U.S. House seat representing a deeply-Republican area in northwest Georgia, businesswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene defeated neurosurgeon Dr. John Cowan for the GOP nomination. Greene will face Democrat Kevin Van Ausdal in November.
Information for this article was contributed by Amy Gardner, Dan Simmons, Holly Bailey and Ingrid Arnesen of The Washington Post; and by Steve Karnowski, Mohamed Ibrahim, Doug Glass, Ben Nadler and Jeff Martin of The Associated Press.