Brynn Anderson/AP Photo
SAVANNAH, GEORGIA – By midday on Tuesday, it was easy to forget it was Election Day in Chatham County, Georgia. Even though the state is considered a toss-up in the presidential election and is home to two U.S. Senate competitions, record early voting has eased the pressure on poll workers.
However, business as usual did not mean that there were no problems at all in the Peach State, which has become an election meltdown hotspot, notorious for long Election Day lines that are often shared in pictures and videos across social media.
On November 3, while Georgia and most other states avoided the observable signs of voting issues, there was still a steady stream of “routine” Election Day obstacles for voters.
At the Savannah High School polling location, ten minutes outside of the historic downtown, the veteran team of poll workers hit near-record turnout with more than 160 voters, two hours before the polls closed. Comparisons were made to Obama’s first election.
But for Bre Smith, 26, and her boyfriend Jessie Allen, 39, their voting plan didn’t come to fruition. Smith was made to fill out a provisional ballot after her voter ID showed her as a registered voter in a different county. Election officials had to call the main office to verify her information, which Smith says must not have been updated properly, because she went to change her address at the DMV earlier this year.
Her boyfriend was barred from voting altogether, finding out at the polling site that he had been purged. The last time he voted was in 2008 for Barack Obama, and since then his information had been removed from the registration system. Allen says he also tried to vote in 2013, finding out then he was purged as well, but didn’t know he had to take action to get himself back on the rolls. Allen had only one word to sum up his experience today: maddening.
While they were the outliers in a day that mostly ran smoothly, with no long lines and only isolated technical-setup issues, Smith and Allen were nonetheless frustrated with the amount of time it took to find out they weren’t going to be voting as usual.
This presidential election was expected to have many more Election Day issues. After the coronavirus pandemic threatened the availability of traditional in-person voting, the main way American voted in past elections, in addition to the fears of foreign interference caused by 2016’s election and the constant spreading of misinformation and disinformation about voting, there were reasonable causes for alarm.
But from that panic came preparedness. And in Georgia, which was the center of an election dispute in 2018, more than three million people voted before Election Day, taking advantage of the expanded voting options this November. Aunna Dennis, executive director of Common Cause Georgia, says that Georgia is a “traditional state” with a population that prefers to vote in person, and this year a surge of voters utilized the early in-person option.
There were also reports of some polling places being moved at the last minute, which is also somewhat routine for the Peach State.
This general election, Georgia will not be the online example of voting issues or suppression. But when it comes to tabulating and counting ballots, Dennis explains that there is still work to be done managing expectations on election night. While today’s in-person voting functioned as usual, there will still be a higher-than-usual number of absentee mail-in ballots to add to the final counts. With two competitive Senate races, which could both be going to runoff elections in January, officials are trying to prepare people to be patient.
Looking forward, today’s democratic process in Georgia sets a new standard for the voting experience and may create a new level of comfort with voting options besides in-person Election Day voting. But Karen Flynn, president of Common Cause, says there’s still a lot of work to be done.
While expansions this year to voting by mail and early voting have been positive for expanding the franchise, some states still have restrictive requirements that come with those options. The work will continue after this election to address those disparities.
“There are [also] states that put additional barriers to vote-by-mail,” Flynn says. “There are strict signature matches, or requiring witnesses to verify voting, so from our perspective there’s a lot more work that we can be doing to strengthen capacity.”
