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‘I Refuse Not to Be Heard’:

Georgia in Uproar Over Voting
Meltdown
Long lines and malfunctioning voting
machines marred statewide primary elections
in Georgia, renewing attention on voting rights
there.

1:09

Drone Footage Shows Long Lines

Facing Georgia Voters
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After several polling locations were closed, thousands of

Georgia voters were sent to cast ballots at Park Tavern, a
restaurant in Atlanta. Audra Melton for The New York Times

By Richard Fausset, Reid J. Epstein and Rick Rojas

Published June 9, 2020

Updated June 10, 2020, 309
1:52 a.m. ET

[Update: Jon Ossoff holds strong lead as

Georgia waits for primary results.]

ATLANTA — Georgia’s statewide primary

elections on Tuesday were overwhelmed by a
full-scale meltdown of new voting systems put
in place after widespread claims of voter
suppression during the state’s 2018 governor’s
election.

Scores of new state-ordered voting machines

were reported to be missing or
malfunctioning, and hourslong lines
materialized at polling places across Georgia.

Some people gave up and left before casting a

ballot, and concerns spread that the problems
would disenfranchise untold voters,
particularly African-Americans.
Predominantly black areas experienced some
of the worst problems.

With Republican-leaning Georgia emerging as

a possible battleground in this year’s
presidential election and home to two
competitive Senate races, the voting mess
rattled Democratic officials and voters, with
some blaming the state’s Republican governor
and secretary of state for hastily instituting a
new voting system without enough
provisional ballots in case the voting machines
did not function.

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“It is a disaster that was preventable,” Stacey

Abrams, the Democrat who narrowly lost the
disputed 2018 governor’s race, said in an
interview Tuesday afternoon. “It is
emblematic of the deep systemic issues we
have here in Georgia. One of the reasons we
are so insistent upon better operations is that
you can have good laws, but if you have
incompetent management and malfeasance,
voters get hurt, and that’s what we see
happening in Georgia today.”

Security experts had warned that there was

not nearly enough time to switch systems
before the 2020 elections — especially amid
the coronavirus pandemic, which ravaged the
state and scared away hundreds of poll
workers.

Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad

Raffensperger, blamed local officials in Fulton
County, which includes most of the City of
Atlanta, and said there were few issues
elsewhere, while by midafternoon counties
outside Atlanta had begun extending voting
hours to account for time lost tending to the
new machines.

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Fulton County kept all of its polling sites open

for two extra hours, until 9 p.m. Eastern.
DeKalb County, just east of Fulton, kept seven
precincts open late, one until 10:10 p.m. And
Chatham County, which includes Savannah
and is the state’s largest county outside
greater Atlanta, kept 35 polling sites open
until 9 p.m.

Ballot counting proceeded slowly on Tuesday

night, with people still in line to vote in some
places as the polls closed. No winners in major
races had been called as of midnight.

“We have 159 counties and, by and large, 150

counties have really done a great job,” Mr.
Raffensperger said. “We have one county that
just stands out with glaring failures, and that’s
Fulton County, and unfortunately that’s our
largest county.”

Rick Barron, the Fulton County elections

director, said the problems were “mostly
equipment issues, many caused by different
training challenges that we had.” He said Mr.
Raffensberger “can’t wash his hands of
responsibility,” but added that trying to
simultaneously conduct an in-person election
and a mail-voting one had stretched the
county’s resources.

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The difficulties renewed public attention on

voting rights in a state where black citizens
have long accused the white Republicans who
control the state’s government and elections of
racially discriminatory voter suppression.

While the worst problems were reported in

greater Atlanta, no corner of the state had a
fully functional voting experience, officials
said. Nikema Williams, a state senator and the
chairwoman of the Georgia Democratic Party,
said that by 7:10 a.m., she had 84 text
messages reporting polling sites that didn’t
open, machines that didn’t arrive and lines
that stretched for blocks.

“It’s a hot mess,” she said. “Our secretary of

state has not adequately prepared us for
today. We knew today was coming. If you
show up and there’s not a machine, that’s a
problem.”

In Atlanta’s Old Fourth Ward — the

neighborhood where the Rev. Dr. Martin
Luther King Jr. grew up — Marneia Mitchell
arrived at her polling place five minutes
before polls were to open at 7 a.m. She thought
it was early enough to vote fast, avoid trouble
and get on with her day.

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Three hours later, she was still waiting in line,

having moved about 60 feet from where she
had started. At first voters were told that the
machines were not functioning, and then that
poll workers did not have the passwords
necessary to operate them.

The line stretched three long city blocks and

comprised hundreds of voters — a
multicultural crowd in one of the city’s most
cosmopolitan boroughs, many masked, some
in lawn chairs, everyone sweating as the
temperature pushed toward 90 degrees.

Ms. Mitchell, 50, a stationery designer who is

African-American, was livid. “It’s disgusting,”
she said. “It’s despicable.”

Around the corner, Terri Russell, 57, a retired

worker for the Fulton County tax system, had
also been waiting for three hours. She leaned
on a beach chair that a do-gooder had offered
her.

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Ms. Russell, who wore a mask, said that she

had bronchitis and asthma, and that she rarely
left the house even when there was no
pandemic. She said she had requested an
absentee ballot but never received one. “I
refuse not to be heard and so I am standing in
line,” she said.

A poll worker allowed people in to vote at Central Park

Recreation Center in Atlanta on Tuesday. Audra Melton for
The New York Times

Just south of Atlanta’s airport, in Clayton

County, the predominantly black precinct at
the Christian Fellowship Baptist Church had
run out of Democratic primary provisional
ballots by 10 a.m., according to Fair Fight
Action, the voting rights organization founded
by Ms. Abrams.

An uncontested Republican stronghold since

the Clinton administration, Georgia is now a
presidential battleground state for the first
time in a generation, drawing renewed
scrutiny to the state’s cumbersome and long-
suppressive voting systems. Along with the
contest between President Trump and former
Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., Georgians
will cast ballots this November in two
competitive Senate races, the results of which
could help tip the balance of the chamber.

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The voting problems Georgia experienced on

Tuesday were hardly a surprise. Residents
reported requesting absentee ballots and
waiting months for them to arrive — and some
never came at all. Ms. Abrams said her
absentee ballot had arrived with a sealed
return envelope, and she was unable to mail it
back. Ms. Williams waited five hours at an
early-voting site after her absentee ballot
never arrived in the mail.

David Dreyer, a Democratic state

representative, said he learned Saturday that
Fulton County was short 250 poll workers.
Many of the usual poll workers are older and
were afraid to work because of the
coronavirus.

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A training session for poll workers held

Monday, Mr. Dreyer said, consisted of a one-
hour training video provided by the secretary
of state on how to use the voting machines —
but “you needed an I.T. professional to figure
it out.”

Georgia’s voting fiasco stemmed primarily

from the 30,000 new voting machines the state
bought last year for $107 million from
Dominion Voting Systems, which is based in
Denver.

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Tuesday’s primaries were the first time the

machines had been used statewide, though six
rural, predominantly white counties used
them for municipal contests in December —
and experienced problems with voting and
significant delays.

Mr. Raffensperger’s office at first defended the

new machines on Tuesday and said they
hadn’t malfunctioned, with an aide blaming
local officials and inexperienced poll workers
for the problems.

In an interview, Mr. Raffensperger accepted

no blame for the hourslong waits or voting
machine problems in Atlanta or elsewhere in
the state.

Jurisdictions that ran out of provisional

ballots, he said, should have ordered more of
them before the polls opened. County elections
officials should have found more younger poll
workers to replace more experienced ones
who bowed out because of the pandemic, he
said. No element of the elections meltdown,
Mr. Raffensperger said, was his fault.

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“The counties run their elections,” he said.

“The problems in Fulton County are the
problems with their management team, not
with me.”

Kristen Clarke, the president of the Lawyers’

Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said
that a disproportionate number of complaints
by Georgians to the election protection hotline
run by the committee and other advocacy
groups had come from African-Americans.
“We’re getting overwhelmed by the volume of
calls from Georgia,” she said.

The machines bought by the state last year

were instantly controversial. Security experts
said they were insecure. Privacy experts
worried that the screens could be seen from
nearly 30 feet away. Budget hawks balked at
the price tag.

And one of Dominion Voting Systems’

lobbyists, Jared Samuel Thomas, has deep
connections to Gov. Brian Kemp, the
Republican who defeated Ms. Abrams in 2018.
Mr. Thomas served as Mr. Kemp’s campaign
manager in his 2002 State Senate race, and as
chief of staff to Mr. Kemp when he was
secretary of state.

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Mr. Thomas did not respond to messages on

Tuesday, but Kay Stimson, a Dominion vice
president, said the company had received just
50 “calls for election support” from Georgia by
3 p.m. “It’s a relatively low number given the
scale,” she said.

Mr. Raffensperger spent more than $400,000

in federal election assistance funding in March
to air a television commercial promoting the
new machines as “protecting ballot integrity
and making sure every ballot is counted.”

FreedomWorks, a conservative nonprofit

backed by the billionaire Charles Koch, and
the National Election Defense Coalition, a
nonpartisan group focused on election
security, warned Georgia against buying the
machines in February 2019. In a letter sent to
the State Senate’s Ethics Committee, the
groups cited several concerns, including that
the machines were difficult to set up before
elections.

Tuesday’s primaries were the first time that 30,000 new

voting machines had been used statewide. Brynn
Anderson/Associated Press

Election security advocates had urged the

state to instead choose hand-marked paper
ballots, which they argue are more secure and
cost effective.

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The A.C.L.U. of Georgia had warned in

January — well before the coronavirus
emerged as a concern for voters — that the
state was ill-prepared for this year’s elections.

“They were issuing brand-new machines on a

massive scale and that’s never been done
before,” said Andrea Young, the executive
director. “You need to put in more resources,
more training for poll workers, for citizens.”

Ms. Young, who called the elections a

“massive failure,” said that whether the voting
difficulties were because of an intentional
effort to suppress voting or incompetence, the
end result was the same. “This is not
acceptable in a democracy,” she said. “You
can’t do democracy on the cheap.”

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Marilyn Marks, a voting rights advocate with

the Coalition for Good Governance, described
a total breakdown of the new voting system
when she went to a polling place in Atlanta
around 10:30 a.m. All three elements — the
electronic poll books that allow voters to
check in, the touch-screen ballot-selection
machines, and the ballot scanners — had
broken down.

Ms. Marks said the attempt to switch systems

during a presidential election year was
doomed to be riddled with major glitches.
“That would be like Walmart deciding that
they wanted to change out their point-of-sale
system on Black Friday,” she said.

At a news conference on Tuesday night, Ms.

Abrams said, “The best intentions met the
worst preparations, and we found ourselves in
the midst of both incompetence and
malfeasance.”

“No state should look like Georgia did today,”

she added.
Richard Fausset reported from Atlanta, Reid J. Epstein
from Washington, and Rick Rojas from Columbus, Miss.
Nick Corasaniti contributed reporting from Ocean View,
Del., Stephanie Saul from New York, and Michael Wines
from Washington.

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