In a blatant attempt of voter suppression, Cobb County has cut the number of early voting sites for Georgia’s runoff election on January 5 to just five, down from eleven for the general election on November 3.
That matters a lot, as Fox5 Atlanta explains:
Cobb County, with more than 750,000, is the third-most populous county in Georgia. Long a Republican stronghold, it is trending Democratic, with Joe Biden carrying 56% of the vote in the county, and Democrats taking control of many local offices.
The Democratic candidates on the runoff ballot — Jon Ossoff and Raphael are running for US Senate, Daniel Blackman for Georgia’s Public Service Commission — will need to run up the score in the Atlanta metro area to counter Georgia’s heavily Republican rural counties. Suppressing votes in heavily Democratic areas is one best hopes of Republicans to carry the state.
Cobb County officials have come up with a pretty lame excuse for this move:
Cobb Director of Elections, Janine Eveler said the decrease in January early voting sites is a direct result of a lack of manpower. Eveler explained this isn’t a matter of hiring more people. The director of elections said workers would need to be trained, even if they’ve worked at a poll before and there’s not enough time to complete that training.
Yeah, because they’ve known for just five weeks that there is a runoff election and that is just not enough to train poll workers. Probably neighbouring counties have the same problems, right?
Other metro counties such as Fulton, Gwinnett, and DeKalb have plans to maintain the early voting sites they had in November for the January runoff.
Thankfully, there is a strong network of voting rights groups in Georgia and they have already sprung into action:
The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF), All Voting is Local, Georgia, Southern Poverty Law Center Action Fund (SPLC), Georgia NAACP, Black Voters Matter, and American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia (ACLU-GA) have sent a letter to the Cobb County Board of Commissioners and Cobb County Board of Elections and Registration expressing concern about early voting accessibility for the upcoming January 5, 2021, runoff election:
We understand that you are planning to eliminate over half of the County’s advance voting locations, transitioning from eleven locations used for the 2020 general election to only five locations for the upcoming runoff.1 While these closures are likely to adversely affect many Cobb County voters, we are especially concerned that these closures will be harmful to Cobb County’s Black and Latinx voters because many of the locations are in Black and Latinx communities. We urge you to maintain eleven advance voting locations for the upcoming runoff election. [...]
In Cobb County, advance voting is especially important. The County experienced among the longest advance voting lines in Georgia during the general election. Indeed, it was reported that the County initially designated nine advance voting locations for the general election, but added two additional advance voting locations (for a total of eleven locations) after experiencing record-breaking in-person voter turnout and extremely long lines at the start of the advance voting period. Even with eleven locations, Cobb County voters still endured wait times as long as ten hours at advance voting locations.
The cuts are most severe in the heavily Black southern part of Cobb County, where three existing sites are replaced with just one new one — so nobody will be able to vote at the same location as for the general election.
In an excellent move, the organizations offered help with “problem” of too few poll workers:
We understand that Director Eveler had expressed certain concerns about maintaining eleven advance voting locations, including limited availability of trained poll workers and poll managers, during the December 3, 2020 meeting of the Cobb County Board of Elections and Registration. These concerns can be easily addressed and our organizations stand ready to provide you with any assistance you require, including help recruiting and training poll workers or poll managers.
This fight has just started. Watch LaTosha Brown, cofounder of Black Voters Matter, spelling it out:
Republicans will do anything to depress turnout in the Atlanta metro area and erect any roadblock they can. But our people on the ground are fighting back to make sure that everybody will be able to vote in the runoff election. Can you support them by chipping in a few bucks for the Democratic County Committees in the Atlanta metro area via ActBlue?
Do you want to know more about helping Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock win their runoff elections? Check out the diary This is how we are going to win the GA runoffs - a (nearly) complete guide, version 2.0.