JASON SHEPHERD: Who is to blame for Georgia’s election issues? Not who you think

“Voter suppression” was again claimed in Georgia’s 2020 primary election amidst reports of fewer polling locations and faulty voting equipment leading to daunting lines and raising similar allegations as Georgia’s 2018 gubernatorial election. While it is easy to try and point the finger at Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, those responsible for June 9’s voting issues may surprise you.

This finger-pointing occurs against the national meme that Georgians are incapable of holding fair elections. After the 2018 gubernatorial election, one of the most hotly contested elections in recent years, many Democratic leaders, including the former vice president and presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden, claimed that voter suppression gave an improper victory to former Secretary of State and now Gov. Brian Kemp. Stacey Abrams lost the election by 55,000 votes; no irregularities have been found. Yet the national media still insists that “voter suppression” was the basis.

The media trumpets fake “voter suppression” — it may indeed be an issue in Fulton and DeKalb and a few other counties. Those crying voter suppression in the 2018 election claimed that removing dormant or ineligible voters was voter suppression. But only inactive voter names were removed, such as voters who had moved out of state. But because of the lawsuits and settlements following the 2018 election, all of those ineligible names were ADDED back to the polls for 2020! An additional 1.47 million names were added back to the rolls, and, due to the coronavirus, requests for absentee ballots were sent to all.

Every vote by an ineligible voter reduces the value of the vote by every eligible voter who stands in line or takes the time to make sure his or her vote counts. What is more, it is mandated by the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, passed by the Democratic controlled Congress and signed into law by President Bill Clinton. The 1993 legislation more commonly called “Motor Voter,” requires that states keep voter lists up to date by removing inactive voters from voter lists.

We still hear this offensive media drumbeat using pejorative terms like voter “purging.” In October 2018, Kemp said: “ That word purging is outrageous. When people don’t participate in over seven years, they end up coming on off the list per federal law.”

The current policy, signed into law by Gov. Kemp in April 2019, extended the time inactive voters have before removal to nine years, longer than the period of two consecutive elections required by Motor Voter. But the national drumbeat continues.

In addition to objecting to accurate voter rolls, Stacey Abrams insisted the secretary of state had suppressed roughly 54,000 to 84,000 voters, mainly minorities, because over 200 polling locations were closed.

This media lie ignores the fact that the decision to add or subtract polling places is made at the county level. Ten percent of voting locations having been relocated or closed by county officials. In Fulton County, the top five precincts have at least 11,200 registered voters assigned to the location — some as much as 16,000. (The most assigned to any precinct in Cobb is a little over 6,300.) And yet, Fulton and DeKalb counties closed nearly 80 polling locations before the primary elections, crowding registered voters into fewer spots — in an age of social distancing.

Georgia law makes county officials responsible for determining where polling locations should be and how many polling locations to open. Fulton and DeKalb have failed. But county officials are further charged with staffing and equipping polling locations and training poll workers. County officials also failed Georgia here. While most counties did not report issues — or easily resolved issues with trained staff — the metro Atlanta counties reported outages. (In at least two reported cases, the outages were caused by the failure to plug the machines into the wall.)

Responding to reports of severe voter issues in Fulton and DeKalb, Raffensperger faulted county officials for not properly training poll workers on the new voting equipment and for failing to have the necessary number of polling locations open to keep the polls from being overwhelmed.

This is sadly nothing new. In the 2000 General Election, Congressman and civil rights icon John Lewis,D-Atlanta, complained to the Atlanta Journal Constitution that when he went to vote in his precinct shortly after the polls opened at 7 a.m., he found the doors still closed. Lewis told to the paper, “There were about 150 people standing outside in the rain and in the hallway of the building.”

Lewis’s poll manager finally arrived 45 minutes late and a court order allowed the precinct to stay open until 7:45 p.m., but that was not on the list of issues detailed. The Fulton County elections office also received complaints about malfunctioning equipment, long lines and voters who showed up to find they were not on the voting rolls.

Twenty years later, Fulton and DeKalb still have not cleaned up their act. Addressing the June 9 Primary, Georgia’s voting implementation manager Gabriel Sterling echoed the secretary’s sentiments and showed that the problems were local, not from the state:

“We have reports of poll workers not understanding setup or how to operate voting equipment. While these are unfortunate, they are not issues of the equipment but a function of counties engaging in poor planning, limited training, and failures of leadership. Well over 2,000 precincts are functioning normally throughout the state of Georgia.”

Some blame the secretary of state for training issues. Yes, the buck stops there. But other counties, according to Raffensperger, responded quickly to issues and had smoother roll-outs. After criticizing the Democratic leadership of Fulton and DeKalb for not doing enough, Raffensperger opened an investigation on Tuesday to avoid a recurrence in November. That is a good start.

It is unfair to claim that the secretary of state is responsible for everything locally — at some point, county officials must take responsibility for the need for more balloting places. County officials are also responsible for training, verifying the training, testing, and auditing. Those are the responsibilities of any good manager, and the need for training, verification, and auditing is well known in corporate America. But not in our counties, many of which reported inadequately trained workers.

Georgia has more registered voters than ever, and Secretary Raffensperger is anticipating voter turnout in November to top five million — one million more than 2016’s presidential election. Secretary Raffensperger has urged county officials to open more polling locations and hire more poll workers to manage the voter influx.

Though Georgia county officials processed more than 1.6 million absentee ballot requests leading into Tuesday’s primary, a majority of voters still prefer to cast their ballot in-person on Election Day. As the left pushes for voting by mail, counties should not close polling locations, depriving those who prefer in-person voting of that option. Granting Georgians their right to vote requires state-of-the-art management — Georgia’s counties deserve no less.