Will a perfect election in Fulton county make a difference to Republicans?
The Fulton county elections office was calling Amanda Banwarie, again.
She looked down at the number, and before even answering, Banwarie had risen from behind the plastic rec center table in Alpharetta, Georgia, to walk over to the lightly used voting machines, again, to check that everything was still working.
Everything was still working. Again.
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At 2.09pm, she had taken six or seven calls from the elections office. So had 177 other poll managers.
From 7am to 7pm on election day for the Georgia presidential primary on 12 March, a dozen staffers diligently called every poll manager in the county, checking to see whether anything – anything – had gone wrong.
That’s more than 2,100 phone calls.
“This particular person is calling every 45 minutes, not even every hour,” Banwarie, a veteran poll manager, said. Banwarie, 46, is trained in accounting and works in property management when not wrangling a polling place for the county. “So it’s amazing.”
It was hard to tell whether she was being sarcastic or not.
Banwarie has worked on elections for Fulton county for 16 years, enduring hours of frustrating delays and drudgery. She said she appreciates the attention to detail and predictability. “It’s not paranoia. Just like in accounting, you want to make sure everything evens out in the wash. You don’t want to wait until the end. This is how they are trying to improve their processes,” she said.
By Georgia standards, voting on 12 March was a snore. Only about one in eight registered voters turned out for the lightly contested presidential primary, and little else was on the ballot in most places. So far this year, Georgia has escaped all-encompassing mobilization and multimillion-dollar ad blitzes accompanying its fate as the center ring of America’s political circus.
But the show is always on in Fulton county, because a small army of Republican lawmakers, political appointees and activists wait off stage for a pretext to attack even small mistakes. Despite the common refrain that there is no such thing as a perfect election, Fulton county’s registration and elections office is under immense pressure to perform perfectly.
Christine Propst, a Fulton county resident who has been a Republican poll watcher and has challenged the voter registrations of at least 20 people over the last two years, reported her findings on Monday: from 30 polling locations, the party’s poll watchers noted problems with 15 poll pads, five voting machines, three printers for paper ballots and some power strips, she said.
These incidents included a problem with a sign-in electronic pad in Roswell, which had been sent to one polling location while pre-programmed for another. The location had three other fully functional pads, and the malfunctioning one was fixed around noon.
On a day when the location never had more than a dozen people in line to vote, the problem didn’t interfere with anything; election day was utterly devoid of real disruptions. “I can report that at no point did any voting stop” anywhere in the county, said Nadine Williams, who has been Fulton county’s director of registration and elections since January 2023. “There were no reports of any voting that was interrupted or any voters that couldn’t proceed.”
Nonetheless, the two Republicans appointed to Fulton’s five-person elections board voted against certifying the primary election at a meeting on Monday. The board managed to approve certification on a 3-2 vote, but Republican dissent after an election without obvious irregularities bodes ill for how Republicans might approach results in November.
Julie Adams and vice-chairman Michael Heekin had been requesting administrative and operational documents, particularly those showing the chain of custody of elections materials between the polls and the counting room. Fulton county’s administrators said the documents aren’t formally available for review until the end of the week, which is days after the certification vote.
“It was very concerning and insulting that a board member cannot request documents, and further that my vote is not needed,” Adams said. “This is a presidential election year, and like never before in our history, Fulton county will be scrutinized intensely by the press, our citizens, our state, our country and our candidates. We need to give them the very best in providing legal, transparent and accurate elections.”
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Fulton county contains most of Atlanta and is the largest county by population in Georgia. It also takes about two hours to drive from its northernmost precinct to its southernmost, which complicates gathering up votes on election night. The rest of the state has often been left waiting until the early hours of the morning for Fulton county to announce results. Accusations of mismanagement go back for decades.
“As Georgia’s largest and most populous county, Fulton has faced avoidable challenges in running their elections that can easily be addressed through proper leadership, management and planning,” said Mike Hassinger, a spokesman for the Georgia secretary of state’s office. “Fulton voters have demanded action to address election failures and we are thankful for Fulton’s efforts to address their voters’ concerns.”
Even before the 2020 general election, Fulton county and the state election board agreed to a consent order to resolve complaints about the June 2020 primary election. Covid-19 turned an already difficult election into a crisis, with one long-time employee dead and the county’s chief registrar in the hospital on election day. Absentee ballot applications went unprocessed. Legendarily long lines met Atlanta voters.
Lawmakers appointed an outside observer to assess the county’s elections office after the primary. The observer, Carter Jones, ultimately declared that Fulton county’s elections apparatus was rife with sloppiness, mismanagement and disorganization, but wasn’t engaged in malfeasance, dishonesty or fraud.
Election denialists descended upon Fulton county with fire in their eyes and murder on their lips after the 2020 general election. Their claims of fraud have been repeatedly disproven.
That didn’t keep people from issuing threats to Fulton county election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss. Freeman testified last year in the defamation case against Rudy Giuliani that anonymous political terrorists threatened her with lynching and drove her from her home after Trump and Giuliani claimed falsely that she had manipulated the vote.
Florid, indefensible lies circulated about the Fulton county registration and elections board after the 2020 election. But Fulton county’s elections office had been irritating Georgia lawmakers long before anyone outside Georgia had ever heard Giuliani or Trump utter Freeman’s name.
As an appeasement to critics after the 2020 election, lawmakers overhauled the state election board and gave it the authority to supplant local elections appointees. Lawmakers appointed a panel expecting to do just that. But the panel declared in 2023 that Fulton county’s elections processes had improved and rejected taking over the office.
“Replacing the board would not be helpful and would in fact hinder the ongoing improvements to Fulton county elections,” the panel said in its report.
The 2021 law permitting a state takeover requires a panel to find that a county made three or more violations of state election law or rules in the previous two election cycles without fixing those violations, or that the county has shown “nonfeasance, malfeasance or gross negligence” in two elections over two years.
The law doesn’t say how serious those violations need to be.
Sheer scale means larger, urban counties like Fulton, which has about 750,000 active voters, are more likely to make a mistake and thus more vulnerable to a state takeover than a rural county like Bleckley, two hours south of Atlanta with 7,500 voters. One hundred times as many voters means one hundred times as many opportunities for a violation.
“While the reality is that there is no such thing as a mistake-free election, a tightly organized environment lessens the opportunity for mistakes and increases the probability of catching mistakes,” the oversight panel’s report said.
The vote of the board’s two Republican appointees not to certify was effectively a protest, since certification only requires a simple majority of the board. But it also potentially sets up conditions for yet another round of state scrutiny. The state takeover law requires a complaint to be made by sitting legislators or elections directors. But it can also be initiated by appointees to a local election board.
If a challenge to the 2024 election were to be made, it would have to start with a paper trail. Like this.
