Georgia’s Elections Officials Are Overwhelmed Running Three Parallel Elections

(Atlanta) -- For the upcoming General Assembly, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and county election officials are calling for reform of the no-excuse absentee ballot request rule to allow Georgia’s elections officials to effectively run elections in Georgia. Georgia currently requires strained county elections officials to hold three weeks of early, in-person voting, election day voting, and unfettered, no-excuse absentee ballot voting, which strains county resources and budgets.

“In light of the past few months and the overwhelming amount of paper absentee ballots that have been requested, processed and counted, I would support legislation that would require all applicants to provide a reason to receive an absentee ballot by mail,” said Paulding County Elections and Registration Supervisor Deidre Holden. “It would also help with the expense on a county budget due to the extreme cost incurred in the processing of a ballot from beginning to end.”

“Reforming Georgia’s absentee ballot request process to only those have a specific need would take a large burden off of the overwhelmed elections officials here in Lowndes County and across the state,” said Lowndes County Elections Director Deb Cox.

“Asking county elections officials to hold no excuse absentee ballot voting in addition to three weeks of early, in-person voting, and election day voting is too much to manage,” said Secretary Raffensperger. “The way Georgia’s election system is set up under law, county elections officials are essentially required to run three elections simultaneously, one each for a population that wants to vote a different way. Until COVID-19, absentee ballot voters were mostly those who needed to cast absentee ballots. For the sake of our resource stretched and overwhelmed elections officials, we need to reform our absentee ballot system.”

No-excuse absentee ballot voting was passed by the Georgia legislature in 2005 and signed into law by then-Governor Sonny Perdue. For years, the provision was used by between 5% and 7% of Georgia voters, with maximum absentee ballot turnout lower than 300,000 total ballots cast. Such a small percentage of absentee ballots was difficult but manageable for county officials.

As COVID-19 hit Georgia and the country, county elections officials had to deal with an overwhelming surge in absentee ballot voting. The problems caused by the surge in absentee ballots contributed to the long lines seen during the June primaries. Voters who were able to vote in person but requested absentee ballots anyway showed up at the polls to vote in person but still had to cancel their requested ballots. This further slowed down voting lines.

Under current law, Georgia’s county elections officials are effectively tasked with running three parallel elections: early, in-person voting; no-excuse absentee by mail voting; and election day voting. The set up requires elections officials to split their focus, energy, and resources between the three different populations who cast ballots in different ways.

Before COVID-19 hit, many of those who took advantage of no-excuse absentee ballot voting did in fact have a good reason to cast a ballot absentee by mail. As COVID-19 hit, individuals who were able to cast ballots in person nonetheless opted to cast a ballot by mail instead. This dramatically increased the burden on county elections officials who now have to process more than one million absentee ballots.

Georgia is recognized as a national leader in elections. It was the first state in the country to implement the trifecta of automatic voter registration, at least 16 days of early voting (which has been called the “gold standard”), and no-excuse absentee voting. Georgia continues to set records for voter turnout and election participation, seeing the largest increase in average turnout of any other state in the 2018 midterm election and record turnout in 2020, with over 1.3 million absentee by mail voters and over 3.6 million in-person voters utilizing Georgia’s new, secure, paper ballot voting system.

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