Charges upgraded against ATV driver who deliberately hit Atlanta officer
The chaos that plagued Georgia’s primary this week is raising concerns about a potential broader failure of the nation’s patchwork election system that could undermine the November presidential contest, political leaders and elections experts say.
With less than five months to go, fears are mounting that several battleground states are not prepared to administer problem-free elections during the pandemic.
The increasingly urgent concerns are both complex and simple: long lines disproportionately affecting voters of color in places like Atlanta with a history of voter suppression; a severe shortage of poll workers scared away by coronavirus concerns; and an emerging consensus that it could take several days after polls close on Election Day to determine a winner as battleground states struggle with an explosion of mail voting.
“We want a democracy in the United States we can showcase for the world, and right now it’s broken and on full display,” said Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.
Officials across the political spectrum have raised concerns, but there is a contrast in the level of urgency by party, and even by race.
Democrats want to send billions of dollars to overburdened state and local election systems and expand in-person early voting and universal no-excuse mail balloting. Republicans, reluctant to inject the federal government into state elections, have resisted such efforts and instead call on local elections officials, who in urban areas are often Democrats, to fix the problems themselves.
President Donald Trump is also fighting states’ plans to expand voting by mail, raising repeated concerns with no evidence about voter fraud.
Civil rights activist Al Sharpton said he has lost confidence in the nation’s voting system, particularly across states where federal protections that ensured minority voters weren’t disenfranchised have been swept away.
“You’re almost back to the Confederates against the Union,” Sharpton said.
He offered a simple message to people of color and those who run elections this fall: “If you do not vote and protect the vote, then you are helping to keep the knee on our necks.”
Election officials are expressing optimism as they scramble to address glaring problems. Amid continued pandemic concerns, many don’t have enough poll workers to staff voting sites, the capacity to train new workers in states featuring new equipment or the ability to efficiently process the surge in mail ballots.
The challenges have led to extraordinarily long lines, particularly in urban areas.
The final Las Vegas voter wasn’t able to cast a ballot until 3 a.m. Wednesday, eight hours after polls were supposed to close. Some Atlanta voters brought lawn chairs to wait in lines that exceeded five hours.
Wait times of two hours or more were reported in recent weeks across Philadelphia, Milwaukee and Washington, D.C.
Beyond lines, the mail voting boom has caused unprecedented reporting delays.
ATLANTA —
Mike Forcia raises his hands in the air as people photograph the fallen Christopher Columbus statue at the Minnesota state Capitol in St. Paul, Minn., on Wednesday.
The rapidly unfolding movement to pull down Confederate monuments around the U.S. in the wake of George Floyd’s death has extended to statues of slave traders, imperialists, conquerors and explorers around the world, including Christopher Columbus, Cecil Rhodes and Belgium’s King Leopold II.
Protests and, in some cases, acts of vandalism have taken place in such cities as Boston; New York; Paris; Brussels; and Oxford, England, in an intense re-examination of racial injustices over the centuries. Scholars are divided over whether the campaign amounts to erasing history or updating it.
At the University of Oxford, protesters have stepped up their longtime push to remove a statue of Rhodes, the Victorian imperialist who served as prime minister of the Cape Colony in southern Africa. He made a
Charges have been upgraded against a man accused of deliberately running his ATV into an Atlanta police officer directing traffic away from a crowd gathered last month to protest police brutality and
ATLANTA —
the death of George Floyd.
In a statement Thursday, Atlanta police spokesman Carlos Campos said Avery Goggans, 42, of Stone Mountain, faces new charges of aggravated assault, aggravated battery and possession of a firearm during the commission of a felony.
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