Reports came in Tuesday morning from Gwinnett County, east of Atlanta, that voters were encountering hours of delays in some precincts.
Gwinnett County spokesman Joe Sorenson said that five voting locations had experienced trouble, out of a total of 156 in the county.
“One opened about ½ hour late,” he wrote in a message to TPM. “All of the voting precincts that have had issues this morning have been able to process voters.”
Gwinnett County drew attention from voting rights groups in October after state figures showed that the county had rejected nearly one in 10 absentee voter ballots, throwing them out because of allegedly “mismatched” signatures, home addresses, or over failure to complete the necessary forms.
The worst of Tuesday’s snafu appeared to occur at Anderson-Livsey elementary school. A lack of power cords at the precinct meant that voting machines ran out of battery, causing hours-long waits.
A video posted on Twitter from the location showed a long line of voters snaking through the school’s hallway.
Happen to know anybody who could do this in Georgia? ??♀️ no voting at my dads polling site pic.twitter.com/zEyQmXwEq2
— DG911 2lite (@_2lite) November 6, 2018
Other issues in the county stemmed from programming problems involving Express Poll, which shut down touch-screen voting across four separate precincts.
Sorenson said that one precinct had opened around half an hour late in Snellville, due to polling workers failing to hand out paper ballots while the machines were malfunctioning.
A court order was issued extending the precinct’s operating time by 25 minutes.
In a hastily arranged press conference in Snellville, local Democrats told voters to rely on provisional ballots if they were unable to use machines.
Georgia elections have come under heavy scrutiny this cycle thanks to its current Secretary of State and gubernatorial candidate Brian Kemp, who has been accused of using his position in government in his race against Stacey Abrams.
Tierney Sneed contributed reporting to this article.
I hope someone is watching the polls and results very carefully in GA, it is the most likely place where there will be manipulation of the vote and the counting. It’s also the most likely place where Republicans will make a visible mistake, because they are so inept and also believe they are superior and the vote should be irrelevant. Kemp will do anything to win, which makes it likely he will cheat (even more than he already has tried). I hope they don’t go that far, and I hope if they do they get caught and punished to the fullest extent of the law.
Despicable. And not the least bit surprising.
Semi OffTopic:
I sort of expect that late tonight Trump will announce the country went for him by better than 80% and he won the mid-terms. Then he will start mentioning the crowd size for his mid-term inauguration.
If only there were something that Georgia election officials could have done to avoid this.