Everlean Rutherford, of Cobb County, Georgia waited in line for nine hours and 38 minutes, chronicling the saga in tweets and interviews. She started out excited: "This is going to be an election where there are unprecedented numbers of people voting. I love it. Get out and vote!" she told a reporter. “[E]veryone is so nice. I’m talking to people around me. I hear other groups talking and socializing. Some people have chairs and sitting in them."
Hours in, she tweeted: "I went from 'yay love seeing all these people early voting' to 'I've been here over four hours, hungry and ready to go.' Yeah this is voter suppression. It should never take this long to vote. Especially early voting." No, it should not take that long. Rutherford is Black, so she is seven times more likely to have to wait in line for more than an hour to vote than a white voter. She stuck it out—she and 128,000 other voters in Georgia for the first day of in-person voting. That's compared to about 91,000 on the first day in 2016.
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More than 400,000 absentee ballots have been returned, making a total of more than 600,000 early votes cast as of now. But the in-person vote was massive, and the state was not prepared with too few early voting sites available. The lines were the longest in the most Democratic areas in and around Atlanta, Augusta, Savannah, and Macon. Not coincidentally, these heavily Democratic areas are also heavily Black. In Gwinnett County, northeast of Atlanta, voters showed up as early as 4 AM. By midday, the wait for voters at the main elections office was eight hours. Nearly 30% of Gwinnett's population is Black, and almost 22% Hispanic.
State officials touted the long lines as a good thing, with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger saying: "Georgia is seeing record turnout for early voting because of excitement and enthusiasm of the upcoming election. Long lines are to be expected—voters need to be aware of all of their options, including three weeks of early voting, no-excuse absentee and in-person voting day of the election."
It is a sign of enthusiasm and commitment to the process. It's also a travesty that anyone has to wait in line for more than hour to have to vote. Day two of early voting looks like it will keep pace, if what World Central Kitchen is seeing already in Marietta, Georgia, continues. The line there as of 10 AM Tuesday morning was long enough that wait times will be over three hours.