A judge has agreed to extend the deadline to return absentee ballots for voters in a suburban Atlanta county who didn’t receive their ballots because election officials failed to mail them.
The move came after the ACLU of Georgia, Southern Poverty Law Center and Dechert LLP joined forces to file an emergency lawsuit urging officials to extend the deadline for these voters to return their ballots.
The discovery that more than 1,000 Georgia voters were never sent their absentee ballots was made just three days before the midterms in Cobb county, Georgia’s third most populous county.
County elections director Janine Eveler wrote in an email to the county election board that because of staff error, ballots were never created nor sent on two days last month, the lawsuit says.
“We know it wasn’t the voters’ fault, we know it wasn’t the post office’s fault,” said Daniel White, an attorney for the elections office, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “This was an administrative error.”
While the county reports it sent out 277 absentee ballots with pre-paid overnight return envelopes to out-of-state voters affected by this error, according to the lawsuit, hundreds of voters are still unaccounted for.
“There is a direct correlation between the state’s sweeping anti-voter law, SB 202, and Cobb county’s failure to get over a thousand registered voters their absentee ballots,” said Rahul Garabadu, the ACLU of Georgia’s senior voting rights attorney, in an official statement.
Georgia’s Election Integrity Act, SB 202, significantly changed the absentee voting process. The time voters have to request an absentee ballot was cut more than half from 180 days to 77 days. Additionally, absentee ballot application deadlines were also moved up two weeks from past elections. Most notably, in this case, counties were also given a smaller window, three weeks less, to mail ballots to voters.
According to Cobb county election officials, some workers are working overtime to meet the confined deadlines of this election cycle. “Many of the absentee staff have been averaging 80 or more hours a week, and they are exhausted. Still, that is no excuse for such a critical error,” the elections and registrations director, Janine Eveler, said in a message to the board of elections and registration.
Throughout the state, voters, advocates and election officials have felt the impact of Georgia’s new restrictive voting law, despite record in-person turnout. With races affecting the national political landscape and wins likely achieved by paper-thin margins, Georgians understand the importance of every vote.