The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Fraud or flub, let’s fix voting flaws
A contentious race for governor put Georgia’s election system in the national spotlight for months.
It took center stage on Election Day.
Reports of long lines, downed voting machines and registration problems beamed across the nation. The national media narrative was an unfortunate and familiar one: Georgia, a Southern state with a shameful history of denying African-Americans the right to vote, was engaging in racist voter suppression. The long lines were proof.
Almost on cue, civil rights activist the Rev. Jesse Jackson made his way to an Atlanta voting precinct. He called the long lines at Pittman Park Recreation Center “a classic example of voter suppression, denying people easy access to exercise their right to vote.”
Jackson, who has spent a lifetime masterfully reducing the issues of the day to bumper sticker prose, went on to say that the problems were “either incompetence or corruption or both.”
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has been working to understand why some metro Atlanta voters experienced long delays. We also dug deeply into Georgia’s voter registration purge system and found it to be the most aggressive in the nation. We will continue to track provisional balloting and will monitor whether every vote is count.
As for the long wait for some voters, senior investigative reporter Alan Judd, state politics reporter Mark Niesse and Fulton County reporter Arielle Kass each wrote pieces last week shedding light on why some metro Atlanta voters were casting ballots at 10 p.m., a full three hours after polls were scheduled to close.
Here is what we found. There were not enough machines. Thousands of the state’s electronic voting machines had been sequestered as part of an on ongoing federal lawsuit that argues that electronic voting machines could be hacked. Those machines are essentially evidence and the information on them is being preserved as part of that lawsuit filed by a voting rights group. So, as Judd wrote, machines that would typically be in service “sat unused, locked up in government warehouses.”
Fulton County was without 700 voting machines, or about a quarter of the machines the county would typically have to deploy. DeKalb was without 585 machines and Cobb was shy 550 machines, according to Judd’s report in the Thursday edition of the AJC.
But could this have been overcome? Attorney Bruce Brown, who is representing voters in the case, claims the court only ordered the counties to set aside what they can spare. Perhaps the counties did that. Then this happened.
Georgia voters showed up in record numbers. Midterm elections, even with the Georgia governor on the ballot, have typically much lower turnout than in presidential years. The AJC’s Maya Prabhu reports that “In 2010, the last time there was no incumbent running for governor, 45 percent of registered voters cast ballots.”
This time, 57 percent of registered voters, or 3.9 million Georgians, cast ballots. Even with a record number of Georgians casting early ballots — about 2 million — that meant another roughly 2 million voters physically showed up on Election Day.
The counties have a people problem on Election Day. Like most every employer in America, the counties have a demographic problem. Slots left behind by aging poll workers who are giving up this vital election duty aren’t being filled by younger people who possess the same sense of civic responsibility. Poll workers are volunteers, and when you’re a county the size of, say, Gwinnett, you’ll need 3,000 of them. It’s not an easy to fill every slot.
So even if there were an adequate number of machines, there were precincts that could have used a few more hands to make the voting process more efficient.
Now, does this add up to voter suppression? That’s an difficult argument, loaded with the weight of history and the politics of right now. But this is clear: If long lines and confusion have the same effect as voter suppression — frustrating eligible, willing voters into sitting out the process — then it is equally threatening to our democracy.
Such impact is tough to measure. On Friday, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams’ campaign produced voters who discussed how they were affected by the wait.
We went to the polls on Election Day in search of such stories. The AJC started the morning with 10 reporters at the ready to dispatch across metro Atlanta, respond to voting problems and talk to voters at the polls. We coordinated with our TV partners at Channel 2 Action News, giving us a big team of reporters responsive to voter concerns. We received a steady stream of calls and dozens of emails and social media posts and responded to as many as we could.
The biggest complaint was long lines. Unsurprisingly, metro Atlantans rallied to support those voters stuck in lines. Online fundraising efforts paid for pizza and doughnut deliveries to keep those having to wait sustained.
We received occasional reports of people leaving the polls. But it is difficult to determine whether anyone who left returned and cast a ballot.
So where does his leave us after reporters have spent time studying the voting process and its laws, watchdogging local election officials about their lack of machines and personnel, poring through lawsuits, dispatching across the metro area on Election Day and listening to voters express alarm and frustration about their experiences? The clearest takeaway is that state and local government The Atlanta JournalConstitution wants to explain openly to readers what we do and why. Discuss this column and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s coverage of other areas at editor Kevin Riley’s Facebook page, www.facebook.com/ ajceditor. have work to do to build the public’s confidence.
Count me among the folks who wants to see us do better and who is deeply troubled about voters being discouraged.
I am a Southerner whose family was shaped by the Old South. My grandfather, Aaron Chapman, was born in Upstate South Carolina in 1909 and spent much of his life under the thumb of the worst of Jim Crow and denied the right to vote. My father, Leroy Chapman Sr., graduated from a segregated high school just in time to join the Marine Corps and fight in an integrated war. He is a loyal voter today who sacrificed greatly to defend this country and to have a say in who represents him.
Therefore, I sit with a full understanding of what it means to be denied full citizenship because the men who had the most influence on my life had to fight, suffer and live with the indignity of their government telling them they didn’t matter enough to have a voice.
That history, common to much of Georgia, is why the AJC will continue its work in answering question posed by the Rev. Jackson. Is it corruption or incompetence?
It’s never that simple. Whatever the answer, it’s also this: unacceptable.
We can do better.
Email Deputy Managing Editor Leroy Chapman Jr. at Leroy.Chapman@ ajc.com. Follow him on Twittter @ AJCLeroyChapman