Fulton reverses course and accepts emailed absentee ballot requests

Submissions initially rejected for primary due to flood of applications.

Election officials in Fulton County on Tuesday resumed accepting absentee ballot requests submitted by email, backtracking from a decision to require absentee applications by mail, fax or in person.

The county’s reversal came quickly after complaints its refusal to process emailed ballot requests would reduce voting access and violate Georgia voting laws.

Fulton, the most populous county in the state, initially rejected emailed absentee ballot requests following struggles to manage a flood of applications before the June 9 primary election. Many voters in Fulton said they never received their absentee ballots, forcing them to wait in line for hours to vote in person during the coronavirus pandemic.

Voters who emailed absentee ballot requests Monday and part of Tuesday received a response from Fulton asking them to instead send paper applications by mail.

The county Tuesday restarted pr o cessing abs e ntee ba l lot requests for the Aug. 11 runoff, with some limits meant to avoid problems that surfaced before the primary. Only one absentee ballot application may be attached to each email.

Absentee ballot applications

submitted by email must be less than 5 megabytes in size, legible and in PDF or JPG file format.

“We briefly paused in acceptance of email applications as we identified specific parameters in file format to ensure that we could process applications successfully,” county spokeswoman Jessica Corbitt-Dominguez said.

Deputy Secretary of State Jordan Fuchs said the county’s actions highlighted its difficulties in running elections. The secretary of state’s office has said 70% of problems during the primary were concentrated in Fulton.

“Other counties do not have this level of issues with required tasks, but Fulton always seems to have an excuse as to why they can’t do what every other Georgia county can when it comes to elections,” Fuchs said Tuesday.

Fulton is reviewing additional technology options for accepting absentee ballot applications, Corbitt-Dominguez said. The county’s elections task force last week recommended the creation of a website for absentee applications.

The secretary of state’s office is already creating a website where voters will be able to request absentee ballots. The state’s website will go live in advance of the November presidential election.

Georgia law allows voters to submit requests for absentee ballots by mail, fax, electronic transmission or in person. The secretary of state’s website also states absentee ballot applications can be returned by email.

The voting rights group Fair Fight Action called on Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to make clear that all counties in Georgia must accept absentee ballot requests by email.

“Raffensperger must step

Deputy Secretary of State Jordan Fuchs

‘Other counties do not have this level of issues with required tasks, but Fulton always seems to have an excuse as to why they can’t do what every other Georgia county can when it comes to elections.’

up and immediately do his job to ensure that Georgians do not have different access to democracy depending on their ZIP code,” Fair Fight Action CEO Lauren Groh-Wargo said. “He must take action, today, to compel every county in Georgia to accept applications by email.”

There’s no evidence any other Georgia county hasn’t been accepting emailed absentee ballot applications, according to the secretary of state’s office.

It’s unknown how many absentee ballots Fulton failed to send to voters before the primary.

In some cases, the county’s elections office overlooked voters’ emails with more than one absentee ballot application attached. Voters said at the polls on election day they couldn’t find any indication their emailed ballot requests were ever processed.

Still, more than 93,000 absentee ballots were successfully cast in Fulton, the third-most in the state, behind Cobb and DeKalb counties.

Record numbers of Georgia voters cast absentee-bymail ballots in the June 9 primary as they avoided human contact and voted from home.