Here’s how in-person voting should look during the coronavirus pandemic: lots of polling locations, completely staffed with well-protected election employees, each serving small numbers of citizens who are able to quickly get in and out without having to congregate at length in close quarters. Here’s what took place in Georgia on Tuesday: not that.
Despite a record level of absentee ballot, the state was beset by a complex mess on election day, which required thousands of would-be citizens to wait as long as four hours to cast ballots and promised to disenfranchise thousands more. The problems primarily preceded the coronavirus, but they were worsened by election officials’ response to the general public health crisis. In a disturbing indication of what’s to come in November, Georgia is far from the only location where this holds true. Election officials around the nation continue to mishandle the job of performing elections during the pandemic.
Georgia’s elections are notorious even by Southern requirements. Given That the Supreme Court reversed an essential part of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, the state has closed214 polling places, many in bad, rural counties with big African American populations. The current governor, Brian Kemp, presided over his own election in 2018 while functioning as Georgia’s secretary of state and overseeing a purge of numerous thousands of registered voters. Adding to concerns over its election administration, the state in 2015 dedicated to spending over $100 million on new electronic voting devices even as experts warned that paper tallies would be more secure and reputable. The new machines obviously malfunctioned disastrously on Tuesday, at least in certain heavily African American districts, vastly intensifying the issue of insufficient polling areas. Regional and state authorities traded blame. Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, called the problems “undesirable” and promised an examination into election management in the Atlanta location.
The issue of race-based disenfranchisement is as old as the nation, and minimizing ballot locations is among the oldest techniques in the citizen suppression book. The scenario in Georgia, however, show
