Long waits at voting sites show failures of Georgia primary
ATLANTA — The last polling place in Georgia closed well after midnight.
Voters had waited over five hours at Christian City, an assisted living community south of Atlanta. The line twisted far down the street, the most egregious example of extreme delays to participate in Georgia’s troubled primary.
A new trove of elections data shows which voting locations stayed open late, highlighting where voters suffered the longest lines at Georgia’s 2,300 polling places. The secretary of state’s office reported the information to county election officials so they can make improvements before November’s high-turnout presidential election.
About 11% of voting sites in Georgia closed over an hour late, according to an analysis by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution of the elections data. The epicenter of voting problems was Fulton County, where more than three-quarters of polling places closed after 8 p.m.
Black voters bore the brunt of long lines and late closings in overcrowded, understaffed and poorly equipped polling places. Only 61% of majority Black precincts closed on time compared with 80% of mostly white precincts, the AJC’s analysis found.
Georgia’s primary was a debacle created by the coronavirus pandemic, high turnout and difficulties operating new voting computers. Precincts closed, poll workers quit and social distancing restrictions limited the number of people who could vote at a time.
While voting went smoothly in some neighborhoods, others reported a stressful ordeal where voters struggled to get to the front of the line — and sometimes gave up without casting a ballot.
“I had never seen anything like it in my life. It was unacceptable,” said Hiara Imara, who works in public health and waited almost two hours at the McGhee Tennis Center in southwest Atlanta. “It’s almost like they were set up to fail.”
Just one voting machine out of five was working when Imara’s precinct opened June 9, she said. The delays endured throughout the day, and the McGhee Tennis Center finally checked in its last voter close to 9 p.m., two hours later than when polls were scheduled to close.
Election officials will have to make changes to avoid similar problems in November’s general election, when in-person turnout is expected to be three times higher.
They need to add precincts and well-trained poll workers, said Gabriel Sterling, the voting implementation manager for the secretary of state’s office.
“Nobody should have to stand in line that long, and the counties and the state are working together to make sure every voter, regardless of ZIP code, has a smooth voting experience,” Sterling said. “What you want to avoid is having too many voters in a polling location. The way you can do that is having more voting locations and spreading people out.”