Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call via AP Images
Voting in the November 3 general election went off with surprisingly few hitches in Georgia.
In the two Georgia Senate races, election officials are now deciding how many polling places to open, when to hold early voting during the holiday season, and how to staff their polling places ahead of the January 5 election.
While organizers are working to keep voters engaged, and fundraising dollars are flowing in from across the nation, election officials are sometimes acting to frustrate one of the strongest remedies to Georgia’s past voting issues: early voting. In some of the Peach State’s most populous counties, they’re already making operational cuts that voting rights advocates say will cause problems and be disenfranchising to minority voters.
Early voting, also called “advance voting” in Georgia, starts on December 14. But in Cobb, Chatham, Forsyth, and Hall Counties, more voters will be assigned to fewer polling places compared to the November general election, as officials reduce the number of early polling stations available in the three-week early-voting period.
Organizers across the state are anticipating record-breaking voter turnout compared to any other runoff and are pushing the state to prepare for the number of voters they anticipate will want to cast their ballots.
In Cobb County, officials originally planned to slash the number of early-voting sites for the state’s third most populous county from 11 to 5. Many of the closed sites were in areas that are also home to large portions of Black and Latinx residents, according to a heat map and letter from several voting rights organizations.
“Georgia’s Black and Latinx residents are more likely to live in poverty than other residents and will have more difficulty traveling long distances to access advance voting locations, especially because of the limited public transportation options in Cobb County,” said the letter, which was signed by the local chapters of the ACLU, NAACP, and All Voting Is Local. “As a result, the elimination of advance voting locations will discourage or prevent many of Cobb County’s Black and Latinx voters from participating in the runoff election.”
In response, Cobb County officials added back two advance voting sites, but said it wouldn’t be possible to offer the same number of voting sites because of staffing shortages, according to a press release. Early voting for this election will run for three weeks during holiday season, ending on January 1, with hours of operation and voting locations decided at the discretion of each county.
Changes will affect voters outside of the Greater Atlanta area as well. Forsyth and Hall Counties plan to reduce early polling locations by half, from 11 to 5 and 8 to 4, respectively. Both are heavily Republican counties. And Chatham County, home to the city of Savannah and heavily Democratic-leaning, will reduce its early-voting locations by one.
In 2020, Georgia held two extremely different elections: Its June primary was a parable of how not to run elections, with the state’s new voting machines crashing and lines that lasted for hours. But on Election Day in November, Georgia was transformed. Voter protection monitors called the few issues that arose “routine,” and state election manager Gabriel Sterling told The Daily that the average wait time to vote was just three minutes.
Part of Georgia’s operational success in November was due to the expanded options for casting a ballot. About 80 percent of all voters in Georgia cast their ballots through the absentee, mail-in system or at in-person early-voting sites in the presidential election. By diversifying how people could cast their ballots, Georgia cut down on the lines that it’s becoming infamous for on important Election Days. “We had slayed the dragon of long lines,” Sterling said, of the success.
However, the current changes to early-voting sites in these heavily populated counties could bring a return of Georgia’s usual election meltdowns next month.
