News Clips

Aunna Dennis, executive director of Common Cause Georgia, said in a statement that her organization and the Brennan Center in January warned the Secretary of State’s Office to be prepared with “sufficient emergency paper ballots in case of voting machine failure.” She noted that in the several months leading up to the election, other voting rights groups issued similar warnings.  Dennis also called on Raffensperger to create a task force to prepare contingency plans for the upcoming elections. “There are only five months until the general elections, which will almost certainly see record turnout,” she said. “Today’s problems were avoidable – and they disenfranchised voters. That must not be allowed to happen again.”

Aunna Dennis, executive director of government watchdog group Common Cause Georgia, said that election problems are a recurring issue in the state, particularly affecting black and minority communities. “We’re being disproportionately impacted because we’re not even getting enough supplies for our precincts,” said Ms. Dennis, who is black.

“It’s the wild, wild West,” said Aunna Dennis, executive director of Common Cause Georgia. “I don’t know what to call Georgia right now.”

And activists on the ground noted multiple issues at the state and local levels, arguing that voters were unable to find concrete information. Aunna Dennis, the executive director of Common Cause Georgia which is the state chapter of a nonpartisan watchdog group focused on voting rights, says that multiple polling locations moved within the 48 hours before the election with little warning and didn't provide proper signage to indicate the changes in locations for voters. And when machines stopped working, some locations only had 20 emergency and provisional ballots on hand. "For us, those are voter suppression tactics at work," Dennis says. "We all need to sit down to better plan, to create an emergency preparedness plan to make elections be more efficient."

The virus “has had a grave impact, a real dent, in how we’re accessing the ballot,” said Aunna Dennis, the Georgia executive director for Common Cause, a nonpartisan grass-roots organization focused on voting rights. She said the simple question of ballot access should take precedence over any horse-race predictions. “The system is broken here in Georgia,” she said.

Suzanne Almeida, the interim director of Common Cause Pennsylvania, said adding more secure ballot drop boxes would be an easy and cheap way for counties and local election officials to increase accessibility. “Many of these reforms that we're looking at are systemic and require and require significant additional funding,” Almeida said. “It's a culture shift in Pennsylvania, as this is the first election we've ever voted by mail by these numbers. “Folks need to understand that it's better to get it right than to get it quick. That we're just not going to see the kind of results on election night, when we see 2 million absentee ballots. And that's okay, that it's not evidence of shenanigans,” Almeida said.