What went wrong at two Columbus voting precincts on June 9? Elections office explains
Tim Williams wanted to vote first thing in the morning, in Georgia’s June 9 primaries,
“I just figured there was going to be a big crowd,” said the 33-year-old Columbus truck driver, who has been a regular voter since 2005.
Because of his occupation, he has not regularly gone to his voting precinct on Election Day, because he’s so often on the road. He usually votes in advance, at the county’s early voting poll.
Not this time: He had the day off, so he got up and headed straight to Canaan Baptist Church off Woodruff Farm Road, arriving about 7 a.m., before a line had formed. He got right in.
And he immediately was told he was at the wrong poll: He needed to be at Holsey Monumental CME Church on Buena Vista Road, poll workers said. So he got back in his car and drove to Holsey, which also had no line at that time, and he walked right in again.
And again he was told he was at the wrong poll: He needed to go back to Canaan.
By the time he got back to Canaan, at 7:39 a.m., a line had formed. Williams waited two hours outside the precinct, and then two hours more once he got in. He was offered a seat, and eventually a “very, very helpful” older gentleman working the poll came to him with a voter card programmed for his ballot, escorted him to a voting machine, plugged the card in and stepped away as Williams voted.
By the time Williams left Canaan, on that steamy, stormy Tuesday, it was after 11:30 a.m.
He was determined to get his vote in, he said, “because change is needed,” so he never gave up. He had decided he would wait as long as it took.
“I had all day,” he said. But others did not: “Some people just went home.”
Similar problems were reported elsewhere in Georgia, during the primaries, including in Fulton and in Chatham County, affecting residents in Atlanta and Savannah. Like Muscogee, those areas extended voting hours to accommodate those still waiting in line when polls were to close at 7 p.m.
Speaking to the New York Times, the chairwoman of the Georgia Democratic Party called it a “hot mess,” with complaints of closed polls, dysfunctional voting equipment, inadequate paper ballot supplies and long delays at crowded voting precincts.
Extending hours
Observers watching Columbus’ polls that day said most precincts were able to mitigate any issues with Georgia’s new “ballot marking” voting system, which aside from a few machines used during early voting was in its first widespread use in Muscogee County, for an election twice postponed because of the COVID-19 crisis.
Holsey was able to resolve its problems within 20 minutes, said poll manager Alana Daniels.
Canaan was not, and as time went on, its line grew longer, with more than 100 people at times standing outside in the heat and the occasional rain. Holsey’s issue, for the rest of the day, was that voters from Canaan kept showing up there.
Canaan has 6,698 registered to vote there, according to the elections office, which said Holsey has 7,230. Muscogee County currently has 124,479 active, registered voters, according to the Georgia Secretary of State.
As Election Day wore on, locals eager to help those waiting in line rushed to Canaan to offer aid.
“It has been looking pretty good today, but earlier this morning, I got a lot of calls saying that there was a lot of mix-up between Holsey Monumental and also Canaan,” Marquese Averett, a local activist and community organizer, said outside Canaan that afternoon. “So a lot of us came here trying to figure out what it is that we could do.”
Volunteers came by with bottles of water, boxes of pizza and umbrellas for those waiting in line. Both Williams and Averett said state voter hotlines and smartphone apps meant to aid voters didn’t work.
Williams said he called two state hotlines, as he waited in line, and both were disconnected.
Around noon, the county elections board decided the problems were so prevalent that a court order was needed to expand voting hours to 9 p.m. — not only for Canaan and Holsey, but for all 25 voting precincts.
“All of the folks involved felt like, on balance, it was more equitable just to keep all of the precincts open, for the extra two hours, rather than have just two precincts open until 9 — just so there’s no appearance of one precinct being open for more hours than another one,” said attorney Jim Clark, who with colleague Thomas Gristina represented the elections board in seeking the order.
Every eligible voter in line at 9 p.m. was allowed to cast a ballot. Canaan was the last precinct to close, the final ballot cast there at 10:18 p.m.
“I hope that we can get it right before the November election — it’s too important,” Averett said. “People don’t have four and five hours to sit in line, and hope that they can get in and vote. People have lives; they have jobs; they have kids; they have stuff to do…. I don’t know if we’ll ever know the totality of how many people actually left because they were discouraged and chose not to come back out again.”
Where did the problem start?
A flaw in state voting data is what led to the problems at Holsey and Canaan, said Nancy Boren, executive director of the Muscogee County Board of Elections and Registration.
The Saturday before Election Day, Muscogee County checked its voter rolls, and determined they were accurate, with the right voters assigned to the right precincts, she said.
But then, under the new system, that data set again was downloaded from an online “cloud” managed by the state, and it wasn’t right: Canaan’s voters had been assigned to Holsey; Holsey’s voters had been assigned to Canaan.
“It wasn’t the voting machines,” Boren said. “It was the check-in, where a voter checks in to get their voter card, to go to the ballot marking devices. The data that was on the Canaan check-in pad had Holsey voters, and the information that was on the Holsey check-in pad had Canaan voters.”
Under Georgia’s previous voting system, this easily could have been fixed: A poll manager with a supervisor’s code could have typed that code in and pulled in the correct data to the appropriate precinct. The new system did not allow that.
Poll managers had two ways to work around the problem: One was what’s called an “emergency ballot,” a paper ballot that a voter found to be duly registered could fill out and cast. It’s essentially the same as a mail-in absentee ballot, and is counted the same as an absentee.
That distinguishes emergency ballots from “provisional ballots,” which are paper ballots filed by residents whose voter registration may be marred by some issue, such as they don’t appear on the voter rolls, though they insist they’re registered. Also voters who fail to provide proper identification may file provisional ballots.
Provisional ballots are not counted with the rest, on election night. The five-member elections board has to inspect and approve each one before the final tally is certified.
The second workaround to the Holsey-Canaan mismatch was to have poll workers consult hard-copy voter lists and manually type in the voter’s information to program a ballot card to use in the new ballot-marking devices.
This became the preferred option, for voters who did not trust “emergency ballots,” possibly because of the word “emergency”: They apparently did not believe that guaranteed their vote would be counted.
So, most chose to have their registration information manually plugged in, so they could get a programmed ballot card. That slowed everything down, as sometimes the ballot card didn’t work, and they had to go back and get another, so the line outside continued to grow.
Of the data mismatch, Boren said: “We were able to mitigate that over time, and we were able to fix that. Canaan, though, had a slowdown, simply because of the number of voters that turned out, and voters who were offered an emergency paper ballot, but did not want to use the emergency paper ballot in lieu of voting on the ballot marking device.”
She now hopes that in the elections to come, poll managers will have another option, similar to the old system, and already used during early, in-person voting: They will be able to type in a code and program a ballot tailored to each individual voter, no matter which precinct that voter’s assigned to.
Training poll workers
Boren had expected poll workers to get additional experience with the new voting system in an Aug. 11 special election runoff for Columbus Council District 4, but that’s in question now that one candidate has withdrawn and another has said she will, too. All 25 Muscogee precinct managers were to work the five polls involved, to collaborate and learn from each other.
“That would have been a great opportunity,” she said.
Absent that election, poll workers in August and September will undergo additional training, adding up to about four hours for each. It will include more instruction in how to set up the ballot marking devices and other equipment, how to “troubleshoot” problems with the gear, and how to access “redundant backups” for issues such as duly registered voters not showing up on the rolls, she said.
The training will have separate sessions for office staff, precinct managers and assistant managers, and clerks, and some instruction with all of them together. “The skill levels are different,” she said. The pre-election training is not unusual, particularly before a presidential election, she added: “We always train before every election.”
Should Election Day issues again arise in November, the elections board still has the option of going to a Superior Court judge to ask for extended voting hours.
This story was originally published June 23, 2020 at 12:54 PM.