Fulton elections department to get help from a critic

To help make sure Fulton County doesn’t botch another election next month, the elections board has brought in a well-regarded expert with zero tolerance for bureaucratic incompetence, and whose opinions the board hasn’t always wanted to hear.

When he was elections supervisor in Forsyth County, Gary Smith once broke down the door to a precinct when a building manager refused to unlock it. Even though about 100 anxious voters were lined up outside to cast their ballots in the 2004 presidential election, the manager said no one gave him orders to open the county health services building that morning.

Smith enlisted a big man in line to help him bust through the lock. Everyone cheered.

More than once, Smith’s no-nonsense approach to elections operations has put him at odds with Fulton. Now elections board members, under heavy scrutiny in the lead-up to Nov. 6, have turned to Smith for help. On Thursday they hired him as a consultant on a temporary basis at a rate of $42 per hour, the maximum allowed by the county manager’s office. Board Chairman Roderick Edmond said they’ll try to get Smith more money.

“It was an obvious choice,” elections board member William Riley said, “because he had done a critical analysis of what we’re doing.”

Earlier this month, Smith was lined up to testify against the Fulton elections department in a case alleging that the July primary was so badly mishandled, results couldn’t be trusted. Last year he was part of a panel that recommended against hiring Sam Westmoreland to be Fulton’s elections director — advice that the board threw out with disastrous results.

Smith is now the only employee in the Fulton office who has ever previously run an elections department. Westmoreland, who resigned last month after landing in jail for failing to follow sentencing terms from 2008 and 2009 DUI arrests, had never run a major election.

“It’s going to take everybody in that office pulling together to make sure it goes smoothly,” Smith said.

Smith spent eight years as Forsyth’s elections supervisor before retiring in 2010. For six of those years he was a Georgia Election Officials Association board member, voted in by his peers statewide.

Interim Director Sharon Mitchell said Smith will work up to 40 hours per week for a maximum of nine weeks, meaning the position could cost the county more than $15,000. Board members have said the money will come from unfilled positions, including Westmoreland’s unused $105,000 salary.

“It’s tough to parachute in, the way he’s doing,” said elections law expert Heather Gerken, a Yale Law School professor who cited Smith’s data analysis work in her book “The Democracy Index.” “But if there’s anyone who can make a difference in such a short turnaround, it’s Gary Smith.”

A week before the hiring, Smith was ready to testify as an expert witness for former Sheriff Richard Lankford, who sued the elections board to force a runoff against current Sheriff Ted Jackson.

Lankford alleged that a litany of irregularities and sloppy record keeping called into question Jackson’s victory with 50.05 percent of the vote. Smith would have described gaps in chain-of-custody paperwork for both memory cards and voting machines.

Elections board attorney A. Lee Parks argued to keep Smith off the stand. Ultimately, Parks convinced the judge to throw out Lankford’s case on a technicality.

Smith was also part of the original three-person panel that interviewed candidates for the Fulton elections director’s position last year. That panel put Westmoreland near the bottom of the list. But the elections board, prompted by Riley, threw out those evaluations and did their own interviewing, putting Westmoreland — a personal friend of Riley’s — at the top of the list and ensuring he got the job.

County Commissioner Liz Hausmann, one of several officials monitoring the elections board, said she wishes an expert had been brought in sooner, but she’s encouraged that they picked Smith.

“It tells me that they’re not trying to let politics play a role in the selection,” she said, “and that’s a good thing.”