It’s Election Day in Georgia, which means reports of rampant voter suppression are pouring out of the state. This time around, fingers are pointing at a new voting machine system, which, since it produces a paper record of votes, should be an upgrade over the state’s former no-paper-trail system. But many precincts were reporting problems with the machines while state election officials point the finger at human error by poll workers.
Meanwhile, voters were standing in line, with an unknown number giving up on voting after waiting for hours to do so. Both Georgia’s House speaker and its secretary of state have ordered investigations, but they’re both Republicans, so ...
“So far we have no reports of any actual equipment issues,” Statewide Voting Implementation Manager Gabriel Sterling said in a statement. “We do have reports of equipment being delivered to the wrong locations and delivered late. We have reports of poll workers not understanding setup or how to operate voting equipment. While these are unfortunate, they are not issues of the equipment but a function of counties engaging in poor planning, limited training and failures of leadership.”
But one local precinct manager told Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporters: “The touch pads aren’t receiving or accepting the authorizations, and we are out of provisional ballots. There’s nothing we can do.” Another reported that tablets used to check in voters weren’t working.
And even if we accept the state official’s claim that the equipment is working if poll workers use it correctly, the fact that equipment was delivered to the wrong locations or late is its own big problem. One local news reporter tweeted that up to 20% of the precincts in one county weren’t ready to open at 7 AM: “In some cases no scanners, or printers, or paper.”
State officials don’t just get to point the finger at county and local officials here. The state is implementing an entirely new voting system, and if there are widespread problems—which there appear to be, with multiple counties experiencing serious problems—that’s a state-level problem. Even if the problem is truly local incompetence, is this not something the state could have seen coming and moved to provide training and guidance for?
It’s maybe a good thing this system is getting a try-out before November’s elections, but Georgia clearly has a lot to fix.
