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The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has scrutinized the Fulton County Registration and Elections Department for the past five months, starting when the office came under fire for a plan to purge nearly 1,100 voters from its rolls who were believed to be registered at demolished public housing projects. By poring over stacks of public documents, analyzing voter spreadsheets, attending open meetings and interviewing experts, county officials and affected voters, the AJC has exposed flaws in the hiring of the former department director and called into question top officials’ blaming of poll workers for an inordinate number of provisional ballots being used Nov. 6. Today’s article deals with complaints filed against the department concerning the 2010 gubernatorial election.
On the heels of yet another Election Day fiasco, Fulton County must answer to state regulators next week for a list of voter complaints that could lead to fines, sanctions or monitoring.
They aren’t complaints from two weeks ago, but from two years ago. In one gaffe, the county sent the wrong absentee ballots to hundreds of voters — twice.
The complaints point to systemic problems within an elections office that has failed to accommodate all its voters for years, repeatedly spurring investigations by the Secretary of State’s Office and in one case leading to a record $120,000 fine.
While frustrations are still fresh from the most recent election, which produced more than 100 complaints against Fulton to the state, an upcoming State Election Board hearing will deal with nine charges from the November 2010 gubernatorial election.
The state process, starting with a Nov. 27 hearing, will also shed light on possible consequences for more recent errors, such as assigning hundreds of voters to the wrong races in July and unnecessarily giving thousands of voters provisional ballots earlier this month.
Fulton Registration and Elections Board members, who oversee the department, met privately Monday with their attorney to discuss strategy. The 2010 charges include:
- Mailing at least 226 voters absentee ballots for the wrong precinct then, because a spreadsheet error hadn't been fixed, sending the wrong ballots again. The county finally sent the right ones and got back 150 correct ballots and 35 incorrect ballots.
- Erroneously telling a woman who showed up at a polling place that she had already voted. The woman claims she heard one poll worker tell another to mark her as her husband and let her vote. Mitchell said Monday that the woman did not cast a vote in place of her husband.
- Failing to send absentee ballots to at least four people who had requested them. In one case, the county sent a second ballot, but the voter didn't return it in time to be counted, prompting her to claim she had been disenfranchised. In another case, staffers said they couldn't make out an address in tiny type.
After the closed meeting, Chairman Roderick Edmond promised reforms. The board has begun a nationwide search for a new director to replace Sam Westmoreland, who resigned six weeks before the Nov. 6 election while in jail for failing to follow probation terms from a DUI arrest.
Edmond said he has seen improvement, but it will require consistency. He added, “It’s going to take some very, very, I’ll say, hard and definitive changes in a culture.”
The Secretary of State’s Office is currently investigating 111 complaints from this year’s presidential election, such as poll workers wrongly steering some voters to provisional ballots and denying those ballots to others.
Edmond said Monday that it appears the trouble started when the department fell behind on entering voter registration data into a computer system. Six thousand people had still not been entered the Friday before the election, the last day to get them into the system.
While interim Elections Director Sharon Mitchell said those names were compiled over the weekend onto printed supplemental lists, the Secretary of State’s Office and some poll workers have since alleged that those lists were still being delivered hours after voting started. Some poll workers, not knowing scores of people were eligible to vote on touch-screen machines, ran out of provisional ballots and had to wait to be restocked, creating long waits and possibly disenfranchising voters who gave up and left.
Ronnie Mosley, a 21-year-old student who got caught up in a ballot shortage at Morehouse College, said he still hasn’t received official word on whether his provisional vote counted. Though he was legitimately registered, a poll worker told him he wasn’t on the list.
The state needs to impose something beyond a fine, he said, such as constant monitoring on election days.
“They’ve been fined before,” he said. “I think if this continues, eventually, they’re going to have to answer to the people directly.”
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