GEORGIA RECORDER: Georgians voting absentee urged by election officials to drop ballots off at county drop boxes

BY STANLEY DUNLAP, GEORGIA RECORDER — OCTOBER 29,2024

Metro Atlanta postal delivery hub plagued by delays.

The political landscape has shifted greatly since the 2020 presidential election when a record number of Georgians voted absentee during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Four years ago after Election Day, then-President Donald Trump and his Republican allies sparked a wildfire of conspiracy theories regarding absentee ballot voting fraud as the reason he lost the election to Joe Biden in Georgia by less than 12,000 votes.

Mail-in voting will be an important aspect of this year’s Nov. 5 presidential election, which has so far seen a record early voting turnout of more than 3.2 million Georgians casting ballots in person at the polls, or 44% of all active voters.

The state’s early voting period ends Friday.

As of Monday, more than 199,000 Georgians have turned in absentee ballots out of a total of 342,000 requested ballots. Voters who did not request an absentee ballot by Friday’s deadline must now vote early in person or on the Nov. 5 Election Day.

Election officials in Georgia and several voting rights organizations are encouraging voters to directly return their absentee ballots to county election offices and drop boxes, or to vote in person if they have not yet received them.

Georgia’s county election workers greeted a historic number of early-bird voters since select polling places opened Oct. 15, with some locations experiencing wait times in excess of an hour daily. Statewide, reports of long lines were minimal. Voter turnout is expected to increase during this final week of early voting.

Georgia nonprofit Fair Fight Action, a voting access advocacy organization, noted significant problems with mail-in ballot processing this fall and advised voters to return their ballots via drop boxes or in-person voting instead of sending by postal mail. An overhaul of the postal service’s Atlanta Regional Processing and Distribution Center in Palmetto is blamed for delaying mail delivery so much that a bipartisan group of Georgia’s congressional delegation has issued stinging criticism of the U.S. postmaster general.

According to Fair Fight Action, a number of county registrars are coping with delays in vote-by-mail processing, with one third of voters contacted still waiting for their ballots.

A third of the about 190,000 ballots sent to Georgia voters that were unreturned as of last week were within the metro Atlanta area, including the counties of Cobb, Fulton, Gwinnett, and DeKalb. Unreturned ballots in other parts of the state were reported to be at their highest levels in Bibb, Dougherty, and Sumter counties, according to Fair Fight.

Absentee ballots must be received by the time the polls close at 7 p.m. Election Day in order to be counted.

“We do not recommend at this point, that voters, put their ballot in the postal system,” Fair Fight CEO Lauren Groh-Wargo said last week. “They need to return it into a drop box, or they need to go into an early voting center and cancel their mail vote and vote in person because of the postal delays.”

Since the 2020 election, Georgia lawmakers introduced new voter ID laws that specifically limit options for absentee voters.

About 1,200 absentee ballots are on the Georgia Secretary of State’s office list of ones rejected for deficiencies.

Many of the rejections were due to ID errors, which could be a result of Georgia voters being unaware of the new ID requirements that differ for each form of voting, according to VoteRiders, a national voter ID resource organization.

VoteRiders is collaborating with Fair Count of Georgia for a ballot cure program that will assist voters to have their absentee ballots counted by fixing the issues that resulted in their ballots being rejected.

Read the full article in the Georgia Recorder.