All of our efforts go to waste if you don’t show up and vote.” “People now are just superexcited about elections, which is good and bad. “There’s just a lot more people coming in and asking a lot of questions, but we use it as teaching moments,” Logan said. In Jackson County north of Athens, where Trump won 78% of the vote, the 2020 election was a “nightmare” because of complaints from all sides about mask wearing rules along with a flood of absentee ballots that required additional workers to process, Elections Director Jennifer Logan said. The difficulties of running elections stretched across Democratic and Republican counties, in both urban and rural areas. Kidd said he’s prepared for high turnout, and he’s trying to educate voters about how they can get involved to learn about the election process firsthand by serving as poll workers or members of bipartisan vote review panels that count ambiguous ballot marks. “The removal of civility from our electoral process pains me. “There are people in the community that are encouraging individuals to show up at polling locations to cause distractions and basically agitate in what will be a contentious time,” Kidd said. In the elections office, angry voters repeatedly called and emailed employees with baseless complaints about the election.
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Poll workers dealt with people who took pictures of their license plates and called them “unpatriotic” while they were trying to do their jobs, Kidd said. The 2020 election was a “perfect storm” of a new statewide voting system, COVID-19 and a heated political environment, said Milton Kidd, elections director in Douglas County west of Atlanta where 62% of votes went to Biden. While Smith said she’s confident in her employees and processes, she can’t predict how voters would respond to another tight or contested election. Honestly, all we can ever do is take our past experiences and apply them to the future.” “People have always been watching, and we expect them to. “There’s a different spotlight on what we and our poll workers do than we had in the past,” Smith said. In Forsyth County north of Atlanta, where Trump received 66% of the vote, Elections Director Mandi Smith said one of her biggest concerns this year is recruiting enough poll workers after so many left because of COVID-19 or the fallout from 2020. If it ends up being close and allegations are made, it’s likely to start over again,” Harvey said. “They’re still trying to work through stuff that happened two years ago, and they’re looking at possibly a whole new round of it. County election workers are expected to be better prepared to audit election results, maintain airtight election security records and respond to the public.
The burdens of running a transparent and accountable election have only increased, said Chris Harvey, Georgia’s former elections director. About 56% of Cobb voters supported Biden. This year, Cobb has increased security and documentation to verify that ballots haven’t been tampered with, she said. Three vote counts and repeated investigations - including an audit of absentee ballot signatures in Cobb - upheld the results of the presidential election. And the folks that ask these questions have learned more about what we do.”
“We did learn from the 2020 elections how much more scrutiny there is. They send me all kinds of links with conspiracy theories from unreliable sources,” Eveler said. The eyes of the nation were on Georgia during a hand recount of all 5 million ballots cast statewide, and security officers were dispatched to protect vote-counters worried about their safety, Eveler said. In metro Atlanta, three of the region’s four largest counties - DeKalb, Fulton and Gwinnett - have replaced their election directors.Ĭobb County Election Director Janine Eveler, who was recognized for excellence in election administration last year at a conference of Georgia election officials, said antagonism toward election officials escalated after Election Day. Voters are asking a lot of questions, and Holden said she’s giving them detailed answers about the tedious process of how Georgia’s voting machines are tested, how they work and how elections are kept secure.
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