Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger gives a day update on the Georgia Primary Election on the election command center in Atlanta, Georgia, May 24, 2022.
Alyssa Pointer | Reuters
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A Georgia judge on Monday prolonged to Nov. 14 the deadline for the receipt of absentee ballots in Cobb County for Tuesday’s elections after greater than 1,000 people weren’t mailed such ballots after requesting them.
Cobb County Superior Court Judge Kellie Hill ordered the county Board of Elections and Registration to send via overnight delivery Monday substitute ballots to affected voters who had not already been sent substitute ballots.
And Hill ordered that any of the affected voters could be allowed to vote in person, by substitute ballot, or by federal write-in absentee ballot.
The order was agreed to by county election officials after a hearing before Hill on Monday, a day after two civil rights groups on behalf of 4 county voters sued the board and Georgia state elections officials over the county’s failure to mail absentee ballots to about 1,036 voters from Oct. 13 through Oct. 22.
“That is a crucial result for these Cobb County voters, who through no fault of their very own didn’t receive the absentee ballots to which they were legally entitled,” said Jonathan Topaz, an attorney for the Voting Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union, certainly one of the groups that filed the lawsuit.
“We are going to fight to be sure that this agreement is fully enforced and that these voters have the chance to exercise their fundamental right to vote within the November election,” Topaz said.
Hours before the order was issued, the office of Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said it was investigating the failure to mail the ballots, calling it “unacceptable.”
“We’ve got opened an investigation and can confer with the State elections board to find out appropriate consequences,” the office said.
Raffensperger, who’s the state’s top election official, is certainly one of the defendants within the lawsuit, together with Cobb County board officials and the state election board.
The moves got here a day before Election Day, when certainly one of Georgia’s U.S. Senate seats, all the state’s congressional districts and its governor’s office are up for grabs.
Within the Senate race, polls show a statistical deadlock between incumbent Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock and Herschel Walker, the previous football star who’s the Republican nominee. The competition is certainly one of a handful that may resolve which party controls the Senate.
The lawsuit filed Sunday by the ACLU and the Southern Poverty Law Center had warned: “Tons of of Cobb County voters are getting ready to disenfranchisement.”
The suit said that along with the ballots that weren’t mailed for the one-week period in October, “It is predicted that ballots marked as issued on other dates were also not timely processed or mailed.”
“Absent relief, these voters will likely not give you the chance to take part in the November 8, 2022 general election despite properly registering to vote, requesting their absentee ballot by the absentee ballot request deadline, and infrequently contacting the Cobb Board multiple times on their very own to search out out concerning the status of their absentee ballot request,” the suit said.
The Cobb County board didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.
On Saturday, the board issued an announcement saying that it opened a probe into the ballots after some residents reported not receiving them.
Elections and Registration Director Janine Eveler blamed the situation on what the statement called “human error, with recent staff not following procedures on two days to make sure ballots were mailed.”
Eveler told the board, “I’m sorry that this office let these voters down.”
“Most of the absentee staff have been averaging 80 or more hours per week, and so they are exhausted,” she said. “Still, that is not any excuse for such a critical error.”
The board said that “elections staff overnighted absentee ballots to 83 out-of-state addresses and included pre-paid overnight return envelopes.”
“They’d already overnighted ballots to 194 residents from that group who had requested ballots,” the statement said. “Records show one other 271 residents in that group had canceled their ballot request and voted during Advance Voting. The remaining 498 residents identified are urged to vote in person on election day.”
