Fresh from a stinging report on its botched 2012 elections, Fulton County plans a host of fixes to ensure this spring’s primary election runs smoothly.
County officials plan to expand early voting to ease lines on Election Day. They want to revamp training for poll workers and finish a County Commission redistricting in time to notify every voter where they should cast their ballot well before the May 20 primary. And they say they’ll have plenty of extra help to process voter registration applications leading up to the election.
A consultant who documented many of the problems that have plagued recent elections gave Fulton a solid “B” grade for its efforts to implement some of his recommendations.
“It makes me happy I didn’t go down there and spend six months writing a report that got put up on a shelf,” consultant Gary Smith said.
But county elections have been troubled for so long that some remain skeptical.
“It’s crazy every year,” former poll worker Leroy Gall said. “Fulton County can’t get its act together.”
Conducting proper elections is one of the fundamental responsibilities of government. But Georgia’s largest county has had trouble providing reliable service to its 630,000 registered voters.
During the 2012 general election many Fulton voters waited hours to cast ballots. When they finally got to the head of the line, some were told they were at the wrong polling place or weren’t registered at all. Thousands had to cast provisional paper ballots, and some polling places ran out.
An investigation by the Secretary of State’s Office found Fulton violated numerous state election rules and mishandled the ballots of thousands of voters.
The investigation report said Fulton failed to hire enough data-entry workers to handle voter registrations, missed deadlines to process registrations and failed to properly document or secure the provisional ballots of some 9,600 voters.
Though the report found no evidence of voter fraud, it said poor ballot security was a serious problem. The investigation also found problems with the county’s July 2012 primary election.
In December, the State Election Board referred the investigation to the state attorney general for administrative proceedings. A spokeswoman for Attorney General Sam Olens said the matter is pending, but she declined to comment further. Such proceedings often end with a negotiated settlement.
Fulton officials have said the Secretary of State Office’s allegations were exaggerated. Nonetheless, last year the county hired a new election director and fired the interim director who oversaw the 2012 general election.
Now, Fulton is trying to ensure problems aren’t repeated in this year’s primary election. In addition to top state races for governor and the U.S. Senate, every County Commission seat is up for re-election this year.
The first challenge is to finish a County Commission redistricting plan approved last year by the General Assembly. Fulton must use geographic information systems software to ensure every voter is in the proper district. Elections Director Richard Barron said that process will be completed in time to notify every voter where they’ll vote by April 21.
Barron also plans to bring in temporary workers to process registrations earlier than in the past. And Fulton has undertaken other initiatives to ensure things go smoothly:
- It's expanding early voting to take some of the pressure off polling places on Election Day and to better serve voters. In the past, early voting was available at three locations for a total of 134.5 hours. This year early voting will be expanded to 19 locations and 180 hours.
- Fulton will give poll workers more training in person and less online. It also will move training closer to Election Day so it will be fresh in the minds of workers.
- It's expanding voter education efforts to promote registration and early voting and to make voters aware that district boundaries have changed.
- On Election Day, county officials will monitor events from Fulton's Emergency Operations Center, which is usually used during severe weather or other emergencies. Barron said operating from a single location instead of multiple offices will improve communication and make it easier to manage the election.
Most of the changes will carry no expense. Expanding early voting in this year’s primary and general elections will cost Fulton about $400,000. But Barron believes the changes will eventually save the county money.
Gall will believe it when he sees it. He spent eight years as a poll worker in Roswell before leaving in 2011. He remembers many voters arriving at his precinct only to find their names not on the registration list. Sometimes the county failed to provide a supplemental voter list that might have cleared up things. And when poll workers called election managers to resolve the matter, they sometimes couldn’t get an answer.
“I don’t care how many changes they make,” Gall said. “The biggest problem is trying to get answers when you’ve got someone waiting to vote. They say,`We’ll have to call you back.’ ”
Smith, the election consultant, was more generous. He said Barron is “doing a reasonable job of trying to pull some things together.”
Smith said the primary election — which usually has lower turnout than a general election — is a good time to implement some changes. But he’d like to see Fulton pull off two successful elections before he’s ready to give it an “A” for its efforts.
“This is a good place for them to start,” Smith said. “This is a very good time to implement some things, before you get into a real tough one.”
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