This has already been an unprecedented year. However, 2020 is still full of unbelievable twists and turns, with Georgia’s primary on Tuesday representing another example of pandemic-era voting that breaks down in some areas. Even while polls were still open Tuesday, Georgia officials announced that there would be investigations into the extreme wait times people in Atlanta were facing trying to vote.
According to reports from the polling places in the city, poll workers struggled with a new voting system in Georgia. Apparently, numerous machines in the reduced number of polling places were malfunctioning or off. This led to extremely long waits in the majority-black city, raising eyebrows nationally.
Surprisingly, the election results were not the focus on Election Day; instead, polling venues across Atlanta made headlines. Elsewhere in the state, voting was smooth and quick. However, in the city, people were waiting as long as seven hours to cast their ballot.
Unsurprisingly, many people were unable to cast their votes with the extreme wait times. Scenes of people lined up for hours waiting to vote have led to renewed calls for nationwide mail-in ballots for November’s general election.
The failure in Georgia drew the attention of both state officials and the ACLU. “The Georgia elections held today were a massive failure,” said Georgia ACLU executive director Andrea Young. “Whether it is incompetence or intentional voter suppression — the result is the same — Georgians denied their rights as citizens in this democracy.”
This incident has raised concerns for the prospect of voter suppression in November. The novel coronavirus pandemic will still be raging by November. Many voting equality activists have called for increased use of mail-in voting for November’s election. This is sure to be a heated election cycle, with Donald Trump running as incumbent against presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden.
This outsized attention on the election coming during a pandemic has not been without controversy. Trump himself tweeted a series of allegations, without evidence, that voting by mail is prone to fraud. This led to Twitter slapping fact-checking labels on Trump’s tweets, stoking the president’s ire.
Security issues simple enough to be solved with a password manager still plague in-person voting sites, however. While the November election looms, many voting rights activists hope Georgia’s Tuesday primary doesn’t become a preview for a chaotic and contentious November general election.
