Fulton, Clayton may extend voting hours on Tuesday

The Fulton County Board of Registration and Elections will meet at 9 a.m. Monday at the Pryor Street government center to talk about possibly extending voting hours on Tuesday.

Clayton also is considering extending voting at the county’s 58 precincts until 9 p.m. Tuesday.

The county governments are considering the move because of the heavy turnout of early and advance voters. Roughly 35 percent of voters in Georgia have voted.

One of those early voters was Nhykita Dawson, who spent eight hours Friday directing planes at the airport and four more hours standing in line to vote in Clayton County.

Dawson, one of Georgia’s last early voters, didn’t complain about the wait or the cold.

“It counts,” said Dawson, 24, of College Park. “This is the first one I will remember.”

People like Dawson are the reason Clayton County said it asked the U.S. Justice Department to extend voting to Saturday to give workers and people with families time to vote.

But just before 10 p.m. Friday – as Dawson and hundreds of other voters still stood in line – Bob Bolia, chairman of Clayton’s Elections and Registration Board, changed his mind. “Workers were too tired and had already worked 12-hour days all week,” Bolia said.

While the extra day might have alleviated waits on Tuesday, Clayton County Commission Chairman Eldrin Bell said the county wasn’t prepared to handle an extra day of advance voting.

In fact, Clayton wasn’t prepared for the crowds that showed up all week.

The Frank Bailey Senior Center in Riverdale, where Dawson voted, had wait times of up to seven hours on Monday. Most of the week, voters waited in the cold while hallways in the senior center sat empty.Clayton also only used about 50 voting machines for advance voting. It has more than 500 set aside for Tuesday.

“I expected a great turnout, but not like this,” Bell said Saturday morning. “We were prepared, but not enough. We were just overwhelmed. What I would have needed to go forward is an additional crew.”

DeKalb, Gwinnett and Cobb also had long lines and considered asking for an extension of advance voting. But Coweta County was the only one to hold weekend voting, and its polls closed at noon Saturday.

Outside Coweta, the last advance voter in Georgia may have been Mark McShane, 52, of Lawrenceville, who stood in line for five hours and cast his ballot at 11:45 p.m. Friday at the George Pierce Community Center in Suwanee. McShane said this election is pivotal, amounting to a choice between “some serious socialist leanings and some conservative values.”

Bell and County Commissioner Virginia Burton Gray greeted voters Friday night and shared stories.

“At the same time I was first voting, black men and women were being killed in Alabama and Mississippi for exercising the same rights,” said Bell, who cast his first ballot in 1953 in the Fulton County courthouse.

“So when I see ladies 80 and 90 years old with tears running down their eyes and faces in pain from arthritis being able to vote for a young black man who really has a chance to become president, I understand.”

About 35,000 of Clayton’s 148,000 registered voters have already cast ballots.

Staff writers Rhonda Cook and Shane Blatt contributed to this story.