Here’s how in-person voting should look during the coronavirus pandemic: lots of polling places, fully staffed with well-protected election workers, each serving small numbers of voters who are able to quickly get in and out without having to congregate at length in close quarters. Here’s what happened in Georgia on Tuesday: not that.
Despite a record level of absentee voting, the state was beset by a multifaceted fiasco on election day, which forced thousands of would-be voters to wait as long as four hours to cast ballots and seemed likely to disenfranchise thousands more. The problems mostly preceded the coronavirus, but they were made worse by election officials’ response to the public health crisis. In a disturbing sign of what’s to come in November, Georgia is far from the only place where this is true. Election officials around the country continue to bungle the task of conducting elections during the pandemic.
Georgia’s elections are notorious even by southern standards. Since the Supreme Court overturned a key portion of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, the state has closed 214 polling locations, many in poor, rural counties with large African American populations. The current governor, Brian Kemp, presided over his own election in 2018 while serving as Georgia’s secretary of state and overseeing a purge of hundreds of thousands of registered voters. Adding to concerns over its election administration, the state last year committed to spending ..
Support the originator by clicking the read the rest link below.
