Georgia opens early voting with social distancing

ATLANTA — Wait in your car until your group is called. Stand on the painted circle so you don’t get too close to other voters in line. (Please) Wear a mask. Everything you touch will be sanitized.

Those are some of the new procedures Georgians were greeted with Monday as they participated in the first day of in-person early voting for the state’s June 9 primaries with the coronavirus pandemic still raging.

In metro Atlanta’s Cobb County, Election Director Janine Eveler said new procedures and guidelines have “slowed things down considerably, and people are having to wait.” She said that voters faced wait times of over an hour Monday morning.

Eveler said safety procedures implemented in Cobb include having people wait in their car until called up to the line in groups, maintaining 6-foot spacing in line and only allowing a small number of people into the voting room. In addition, an ongoing shortage of poll workers means the county is down to a single early voting location, when normally two are in operation for early voting’s first week.

“We’re still encouraging people to apply for an absentee ballot,” Eveler said. “Voting at the polls is going to mean social distancing and sanitizing, so the process is just going to take a lot longer.”

Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said in an interview Monday from the Cobb County election site that it’s been “a very orderly, safe process” so far.

“People are moving through the lines that we do have,” Raffensperger said. “I think it’s as safe and as healthy of a process as it can be with the situation that we have with COVID-19.”

Raffensperger’s office has sent absentee ballot applications to all 6.9 million active registered voters in the state, and the Republican

secretary is encouraging as many people as possible to skip the polls and vote absentee by mail.

Ryan Germany, an attorney for the secretary of state’s office, said Monday during a conference call meeting of the state election board that over 1.4 million absentee ballots have been requested so far statewide. Germany said of those, 1.25 million ballots have been delivered to homes and over 360,000 completed ballots have been sent back to election officials.

“This current election, the June 9 election, is shaping up to look very different than elections in Georgia usually look,” Germany said.