Washington Post: Voting debacle in Georgia came after months of warnings went unaddressed

06.11.2020 / By Amy Gardner, Michelle Ye Hee Lee and Shawn Boburg
Washington Post: Voting debacle in Georgia came after months of warnings went unaddressed

“The cause of the problems is grave mismanagement of elections here in Georgia,” said Aunna Dennis, executive director of Common Cause Georgia, a civil rights watchdog. “The state failed to heed the warnings of what could happen in this election.”

The warnings came from all sides in the months leading up to Georgia’s disastrous primaries on Tuesday: local election officials, voting rights advocates and even the state’s top election official.

The combination of limited training on new voting machines and reduced polling locations due to the novel coronavirus could produce crushingly long lines and severely hamper voting access, they cautioned.

Yet none of those in charge of Georgia’s elections were able to head off what all agreed was a breakdown of the voting system. Residents waited for hours to cast ballots, some past midnight. Workers struggled to operate new touch-screen machines. Some polling places in suburban Atlanta opened with no equipment at all.
In the aftermath, as the nation reckoned with the possibility of a similar debacle in November, state and local officials blamed each other, but they could not explain why Tuesday’s problems were so predictable — and yet not preventable.

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