Failure comes with potential consequences, including the replacement of Fulton’s majority-Democratic elections board with an appointee by Republicans.

Republican Georgia legislators have already launched a performance review of the heavily Democratic county, a step under the state’s voting law toward ousting its election board, which oversees polling place locations, staffing and certification of results. The Republican-controlled State Election Board could then install its own county elections superintendent.

State Sen. John Albers, one of the legislators who sought the review of Fulton, said he’s “lost all confidence” in the county’s ability to make necessary changes.

“This problem is not new and not getting better with time,” said Albers, a Republican from the north Fulton city of Roswell. “Fulton elections are mismanaged and poorly organized. The people deserve better, and I want to see a comprehensive review and plan for improvement. This is not rocket science.”

Credit: JOHN SPINK / AJC

Credit: JOHN SPINK / AJC

Georgia’s 98-page voting law is most well known for limiting ballot drop boxes, requiring more absentee voter ID and enabling state takeovers of local election operations.

The law also comes with new rules for nonstop ballot counting, early turnout reporting and completion of absentee ballot counts within a day — mandates passed with Fulton and its 850,000 registered voters in mind.

After repeated election problems over the years, this year’s election will show whether Fulton can comply with rising obligations, both during the Nov. 2 election and a potential runoff four weeks later.

“We want to make it as easy for people to vote as we possibly can and prove people wrong,” said Cathy Woolard, a Democrat appointed as the election board’s chairwoman over Republican objections. “We have to hit it on all cylinders.”

Rigor under Georgia voting law

The upcoming election for Atlanta mayor will be a major test for Fulton’s compliance with the voting law.

All absentee ballots must be counted by 5 p.m. the day after the election. Election workers are required to continue counting ballots without stopping except for limited breaks.

The number of in-person ballots cast and absentee ballots returned must be posted publicly by 10 p.m. on the day of the election, and discrepancies with the number of ballots counted must be reconciled within 30 days.

Any shortcomings in complying with the law could be investigated and considered by the performance review panel, potentially building a case for a state takeover.

Richard Barron, Fulton’s elections director, said he’s concerned about tight deadlines in this year’s elections, though next year’s high-turnout election for governor will be an even bigger challenge.

Because the city of Atlanta keeps its polling places open an hour later in municipal elections, until 8 p.m. instead of 7 p.m., election workers will have just two hours to close down polling places, tally memory cards, create reports at polling places, then deliver results downtown from a county that stretches 70 miles in length.

“Will it increase confidence? You would hope that it will. But at the same time, in this climate, it is difficult,” Barron said. “Some of those measures, they don’t hurt things. Some of the times are arbitrary, but we have to follow the law.”

Fulton Commissioner Liz Hausmann said the election office’s poor performance has left her doubting whether it can make significant improvements after so many years of shortcomings.

“I’d like to see well-run elections that people can have confidence in, that the results are provided the same day as the election,” said Hausmann, a Republican representing the Alpharetta area. “I don’t know if that’s doable. I haven’t seen any real evidence that much has changed.”

A history of problems

Fulton’s defenders say the takeover attempt is a politically motivated effort to undermine a county where 73% of voters backed Democrat Joe Biden for president.

But repeated election deficiencies in Fulton are indisputable, from extreme voting wait times in last year’s primary to a series of different problems in November, with unfounded suspicions of fraud mixed with real mistakes.

A monitor installed by the State Election Board found “sloppy” election processes but no evidence of “any dishonesty, fraud or intentional malfeasance.”

Since then, the county has tightened ballot-handling procedures, hired new election managers and rewritten training manuals.

Whether those changes will result in a seamless election day and voter confidence remains to be seen.

“There were very many valid concerns. The only problem is, they were overshadowed by the invalid concerns” about fraud, said Carter Jones, who observed the election during November for the State Election Board. “Fulton has to take some accountability and reform some of this stuff before it’s reformed for them. The more holes in their ship, the more likely it is the state takes over. Figure it out, folks.”

In last year’s presidential election, the county’s election bureaucracy buckled under the load of record turnout, a new voting system and inefficient operations.

The first ballot count took days to complete, with about 125,000 ballots, nearly a quarter of the total, counted after Election Day.

Credit: Ben Gray

Credit: Ben Gray

After 10 p.m. on election night at State Farm Arena, tired election workers prepared to go home for the evening and party monitors left. The confusion, along with video showing a worker moving a ballot container from beneath a table, raised questions by election skeptics. Workers were told to continue counting, and election investigators later said there was no evidence of wrongdoing.

During an audit that counted every ballot by hand, election workers sometimes sorted ballot batches into stacks of ballots entirely for Biden, fueling conspiracy theories. Jones reported failures to ensure ballot security, with ballots sometimes moved around without sign-outs or proper paperwork.

Digital ballot images revealed several hundred ballots were initially scanned twice before a machine recount subtracted 939 votes from Biden’s margin out of 524,000 ballots cast.

Some absentee ballots were mailed to incorrect addresses, and Fulton was unable to find eight drop box ballot transfer forms out of more than 1,500 collected — a shortcoming that contributed to baseless claims that some ballots were illegitimate.

The issues in the presidential election followed a national embarrassment for Fulton in the June 2020 primary.

Voters waited over three hours in line after polling places closed and poorly trained poll workers struggled to operate Georgia’s new voting machines during the height of the coronavirus pandemic.

Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger was among the first to call for state intervention.

A few days after voters waited over three hours at a Piedmont Park precinct during last year’s primary, Raffensperger surrounded himself with posters highlighting 20 years of newspaper headlines about Futon’s election issues.

Raffensperger said last month that Fulton still needs to correct management and training deficiencies.

“Georgians want to fix Fulton County. Residents want to fix it. This has been going on since 1998, a long time before I ever got here,” Raffensperger said in an interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “Enough is enough. I’m glad that the State Election Board is moving forward on this.”

Fulton targeted after presidential election

Despite Fulton’s difficulties, three ballot counts showed similar results, both in the county and statewide, where Biden won by about 12,000 votes. Investigations haven’t turned up evidence of any effort to tamper with election outcomes.

Fulton’s messy elections launched a series of attacks on the county’s election management.

Trump repeatedly criticized Fulton’s elections, suggesting that yet another audit would show he had won Georgia.

“Why are the Radical Left Democrats in Georgia fighting so hard that there not be a Forensic Audit of 150,000 absentee ballots in Fulton County?” Trump said in a statement in May. “There can be only one reason, and that is because they know the vote was corrupt and the audit will show it. Republicans must fight hard and win!”

Trump’s comments inflamed Georgia’s Republican base that continues to demand deeper investigations of Fulton’s election operations. Dubious reports from Republican Party auditors of counterfeit ballots led to an ongoing lawsuit seeking a ballot review, similar to a discredited ballot inspection recently completed in Arizona.

The county election board attempted to fire Barron, its elections director, in February, but the County Commission overrode that effort and retained him.

Bridget Thorne, a Fulton technician in last year’s presidential election, said the county hasn’t done enough to correct its issues. Fulton fired Thorne after she spoke at a hearing Republican state senators held in December that included testimony from conspiracy theorists and Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani.

“I don’t really trust that changes will be made,” Thorne said. “I mean, they can say they’re making these changes, but whether they really do them would have to be proven.”

Staff writer Ben Brasch contributed to this article.

Election changes in Georgia voting law

Source: Senate Bill 202 and State Election Board rules