In the wake of a series of elections errors, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution dug into the issues affecting the Fulton County Registration and Elections Department. By poring over documents, analyzing voter spreadsheets and interviewing experts, county officials, poll workers and voters, the AJC has exposed flaws in the department’s handling of elections and the hiring of a former director. The newspaper revealed how, because of slow data processing, thousands of registered voters didn’t appear on voter rolls in the presidential election, creating long lines and causing Fulton to use more paper ballots than the entire rest of the state combined. Today’s article looks at how more than 100 people voted last year while registered at demolished public housing stock.
More questions have been raised about the integrity of Fulton County elections, specifically whether a flawed registration database has allowed voters to cast fraudulent ballots by claiming they live at vacant addresses.
In November, 122 people who voted are still registered at demolished Atlanta public housing projects, elections Interim Director Sharon Mitchell told the department’s oversight board on Thursday.
The problem could be more widespread. Fulton’s Information Technology department ran a crosscheck and found 10,000 people registered at vacant lots and vacant buildings throughout the county, Mitchell said.
“I had no idea it was that bad,” said Gary Smith, a former Forsyth County elections supervisor who worked as a consultant for Fulton during last year’s presidential contest and penned a damning report about its operations. “It just shows what we’ve been talking about all along with the voter registration database — it’s a mess.”
Both state and county officials have known for years that scores of voters were tied to nonexistent projects, but efforts to fix the problem came too late to clean up the rolls before last year's presidential election. While it is a shared responsibility between voters and the state to keep address records up to date, Mitchell's staff has yet to find that any of 122 voters in question submitted change-of-address forms before the election.
The figures point to more systemic problems in a department trying to pull itself together before November city elections. A series of polling blunders last year has the county under intense scrutiny, with multiple investigations opened by state regulators.
At issue is whether the elections office for the state’s largest county, budgeted at $2.4 million this year, can accommodate all voters while guarding against fraud.
Elections board member Stan Matarazzo, a Republican Party appointee, called the 10,000 figure a “first brush” and said the problem may not be as bad as it seems. The department has yet to drill down into the data and verify, at the street level, whether all of the questionable addresses are indeed empty.
Mitchell said she expects to purge about 50,000 ineligible voters in August — such as dead people, convicted felons and people who haven’t voted in two general elections — and many of the 10,000 could get swept up.
“We don’t know the status of those people, whether they’re active or not,” Mitchell said. “We haven’t gotten that far.”
Matarazzo said he is more alarmed about the 122 voters registered at defunct housing projects, an issue that sparked a partisan dispute on the board last year. He wants staffers to determine if the 122 used invalid addresses when they signed in at the polls, which, Mitchell said, will require sifting through stacks of forms by hand.
“If they signed a voter certificate and didn’t provide a different address, I’m going to make sure they get prosecuted,” Matarazzo said.
Atlanta razed most of its public housing stock during the past two decades and the issue of ineligible voters first came up after the 2009 mayoral runoff between Kasim Reed and Mary Norwood, which Reed won by 714 votes. A subsequent investigation found that only 33 former public housing residents cast ballots. (Norwood has since been appointed to the elections board by the Republican Party.)
Republicans pushed to purge from the rolls 1,100 people they believed to be registered at razed housing. Legal roadblocks prevented the move and the department later planned to flag those voters and make them use provisional, paper ballots if they showed up at the polls. They would then be given until the following Friday to prove where they live.
An analysis of the list by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, however, found it included more than 140 people whose addresses were private residences. The State Elections Division director advised the county against flagging voters.
Laughlin McDonald, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Voting Rights Project, said voters being registered at a defunct address doesn’t necessarily mean they committing fraud. They have a right to vote provisionally if they still live in the county, he said.
That could be the case with many of the 10,000 people believed to be registered at empty addresses.
“I would want to look at the data and see how they compiled it,” McDonald said, “and then find out if these people are still residents.”
