August 11, 2020 Atlanta: Some 70 Fulton County Registration & Election Board workers handled some 20,000 absentee ballots on Tuesday, August 11, 2020 at State Farm Arena located at 1 State Farm Drive in Atlanta. A heated race for Fulton County district attorney saw a light turnout at the polls on Tuesday, August 11, 2020. Incumbent Paul Howard faces his former chief deputy, Fani Willis, in a closely watched contest to become the county’s top prosecutor. Election officials said they learned lessons from the June 9 primary to avoid the kind of extreme lines that some voters encountered last time. Poll workers have been retrained. Technicians were on hand at every voting location in Cobb, DeKalb, Fulton and Gwinnett counties. Voting machines were delivered well in advance of election day. Still, some voters experienced problems and long waits at the polls. Nearly 377,000 Georgians already voted in advance of election day, most of them casting absentee ballots. About 60% of early votes were absentee; the rest were cast in person during three weeks of early voting. With so many voters using absentee ballots, election results might be slow to come in Tuesday night. Absentee ballots will be counted if they’re received by county election officials before 7 p.m., but each ballot has to be fed through a scanner to be counted, a process that can take days. Election officials say it’s normal for absentee vote-counting to take some time. But that means close races might not be settled on election night. The winners of Tuesday’s runoffs will advance to the general election in November, when turnout is expected to break records and exceed 5 million voters. JOHN SPINK/[email protected]
By Zachary Hansen
DeKalb County’s elections board rejected two more challenges by a former Brookhaven mayor, who questioned about 150 voters’ eligibility to cast ballots in Tuesday’s runoff elections.
During a hearing Wednesday evening, J. Max Davis, an attorney who was Brookhaven’s first mayor, alleged that a group of 111 voters and a group of 30 voters might not be eligible for the upcoming vote.
Assistant DeKalb County Attorney Irene Vander Els advised the board to dismiss the challenges, saying that Davis’ claims “lacked sufficient evidence” and are untimely. Anthony Lewis, one of the board’s two Republicans, was the only board member to vote in favor of Davis’ 111-voter challenge. The other challenge was unanimously voted down.
Davis was among three individuals to file challenges last week that questioned the legitimacy of more than 50,000 voters in the runoff elections. Those challenges were denied by the election board after it found no probable cause to question the voters’ legitimacy.
Marci McCarthy, a vice chair in the DeKalb County Republican Party, and Douglas Hartman joined Davis in filing the earlier challenges, which were discussed at a Dec. 22 meeting.
Davis told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution his most recent challenges focused on people who voted in a different state during the Nov. 3 election, then registered to vote in Georgia afterward. He claimed there’s evidence those people registered under temporary addresses and do not intend to live in Georgia after the Jan. 5 runoffs.
“Those are all indicative of someone who is heeding the call of activists across the country to move to Georgia for the specific purpose of voting — not to live here,” Davis said ahead of the election board’s Wednesday afternoon decision. “… That’s illegal, reprehensible, immoral and unethical.”
The earlier voter challenges were part of a statewide effort being led by the Georgia Republican Party and a Texas-based group called True the Vote. In counties across Georgia, the latter has targeted voters whose names showed up on U.S. Postal Service lists for address changes. True the Vote has enlisted local Republicans to challenge those voters’ status with their respective elections boards.
“We just want DeKalb’s election board to do what their job is and make sure that our election has the integrity that rises to the level where people will have confidence in our elections,” Davis told the AJC on Wednesday. He declined to comment about the possibility of further legal challenges.
At least one earlier challenge gained some initial traction: About 4,000 voters in the Columbus area were ordered to prove their eligibility if they want to cast a ballot in Tuesday’s high-stakes runoff. However, a federal judge overturned that ruling earlier this week, and other efforts in counties like Cobb and Gwinnett have been rejected.
Davis said the board didn’t complete its due diligence considering the initial three challenges.
“People will consider this a partisan challenge,” he said. “Well, it seems like the response from the board was partisan as well, because it didn’t ask the questions or look at the questions from a broad perspective. It was more of a one-sided, one-opinioned perspective.”
Thursday is the final day for early voting in DeKalb County before the Jan. 5 runoffs.
Read the original story on AJC.com.
