People queue for hours to vote in US swing state primary election
Ballot shortages and malfunctions with electronic equipment left residents across the state having to endure scorching heat and pouring rain for as long as five hours.
Residents stood queuing for hours in order to finally cast their vote in Georgia’s primary elections on Tuesday.
Ballot shortages and malfunctions with electronic equipment left people across the state having to endure scorching heat and pouring rain for as long as five hours. Others left without voting or obtaining a provisional voting card.
Waiting times were also drawn out due to some experienced staff opting to stay away due to coronavirus as well as social distancing precautions implemented to minimise its spread. Some precincts were closed while others placed limits on the number of people allowed through the doors.
Votes were being cast for candidates in November’s general election, with the primaries seen as a preview.
The Democratic and Republican primaries were initially delayed due to coronavirus pandemic.
In a statement, the state’s voting implementation manager Gabriel Sterling said: ‘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.’
Atlanta’s Democratic Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms tweeted yesterday morning: ‘If you are in line, PLEASE do not allow your vote to be suppressed. PLEASE stay in line.’
Georgia is expected to be one of the battleground states hotly contested by US President Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden.
Biden’s campaign team said the disruption yesterday was ‘completely unacceptable’.
Republicans deflected responsibility to metro Atlanta’s heavily minority and Democratic-controlled counties, while Trump’s top campaign attorney decried ‘the chaos in Georgia’.
Robb Pitts, the chairman of the Fulton County Board of Commissioners, told CNN: ‘We had a problem where seven people who would normally work at the polls, six of them decided they didn’t want to work because of the virus, so we had to scramble at the last minute to find new workers.’
He added that ‘there’s a lot of technology involved now and a lot of our poll workers have typically been retired people and the technology can be a challenge sometimes’.
Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger told the broadcaster the situation in some precincts had been ‘unacceptable’ and said an investigation has been launched into what improvements can be made to resolve the issues before the nation goes to the polls in November.
Atlanta resident Ross Wakefield, a 28-year-old white software engineer who waited nearly four hours to vote and watched others ‘peace out and bail’, said: ‘I feel like we’re struggling as a country right now to hear people who really need to be heard.
‘This does not give me a lot of confidence that we’re doing that.’
Another voter, Monica Hickman, told CNN she waited on line for almost an hour before getting into the voting area ‘only to be told the machines were down’.
She said: ‘When it’s time to vote, everything should work properly because we’re living in critical times and this is one of the ways our voices can be heard.’
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