Early voting starts for coronavirus-impacted June 9 primary in Georgia

Early voting for the June 9 primary in Georgia started Monday, May 18, amid ongoing safety concerns stemming from the coronavirus pandemic coupled with close scrutiny over how the state’s new voting machines perform.

On the ballot are elections for federal, state and local offices plus the presidential preference primary, which has twice been delayed since its original March 24 date due to coronavirus. The general election will be held on Nov. 3. Runoffs, if needed, would be held on Aug. 11.

More than 40 sitting state lawmakers running for reelection in the General Assembly have drawn primary opponents. And several of the state’s 13 congressional seats are being hotly contested by Republican and Democratic candidates in metro Atlanta and North Georgia.

The three-week early voting period comes as county election officials roll out sanitizing and social-distancing measures aimed at reducing coronavirus risks in precincts, such as by cleaning ballot machines with sanitizing wipes and spreading out voters waiting in line.

Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said Monday, May 18, local precincts are spacing voters 6 feet apart while in line and providing poll workers with masks and gloves. Voters are being urged but not required to wear masks, Raffensperger said.

Precincts are also giving voters stylus pens to make ballot selections on touchscreens that are wiped before and after each use, Raffensperger said. Hand sanitizer is also available at precincts.

Raffensperger said he feels confident precincts will be ready to receive larger crowds on June 9 for Election Day.

“They’ll make it happen,” Raffensperger said Monday. “It’ll be a victory. It might be a rough one, but at the end of the day it will be a victory. People that want to vote will be able to vote.”

Early voting for the June 9 primary also will mark one of the first statewide uses of the new $104 million voting machines, which involve touchscreens and scanners that record a paper print-out of a voter’s completed ballot. The old machines in use since 2002 have been scrapped over cybersecurity issues.

State officials hail the new machines as more secure than the old all-electronic machines, while many critics have continued pushing through federal lawsuits for entirely paper ballots.

Purchased last July from Dominion Voting Systems, the new machines were on a tight timeline to roll out ahead of the March 24 presidential preference primary and saw a handful of glitches during a six-county test run last November.

Raffensperger said the new machines “are working great” just as they did for a shortened early-voting period that took place ahead of the then-scheduled March 24 presidential preference primary.

Beyond the new machines, coronavirus has upended the normal voting process in Georgia in ways that have spurred a huge push for absentee ballots and litigation aimed at delaying in-person voting.

As of Monday, May 18, Raffensperger said county officials had collected about 300,000 absentee ballots out of the nearly 1.5 billion ballots requested statewide, a figure already dwarfing the roughly 223,000 mailin ballots cast in the high-turnout 2018 gubernatorial election.

The week of May 11, a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit seeking to delay the primary again to the end of June and for officials to shelve the new touchscreens in favor of paper ballots. The suit argued the screens cannot be cleaned often enough to prevent coronavirus transmissions at precincts.