Electoral administrators for Georgia’s 159 districts are heading into the midterm elections with growing concerns about tighter legal mandates, heightened legal risks, fewer workers and scarce resources.
Their heightened concerns follow two tumultuous years for poll workers and local polling agencies, which have grappled with a global COVID-19 outbreak, verbal and physical harassment, and a spate of recounts fueled by debunked allegations of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election.
Death threats and an aging pool of poll workers had prompted a mass exodus of poll workers across the country, and Georgia was particularly hard hit.
The aftermath of the state’s hard-fought 2020 election season, as well as subsequent restrictive changes to Georgia’s voting laws, have made it significantly more difficult for local polling stations to hire poll workers, particularly polling station managers.
The issue has reached a “tipping point” for Douglas County election officials, county election director Milton Kidd told the Atlanta Civic Circle. “We had almost complete turnover in our poll workers because individuals didn’t want to be involved in the voting process,” he said. “So we go to an intermediate test [election] year with basically a brand new voting staff.”
Kidd said about a third of his office’s seven permanent employees have resigned and about 300 of the usual 300 to 400 seasonal poll workers deployed during the last two election cycles are not returning for the midterms. Half of the election officials he relied on in previous elections have also left.
In addition, a bill rushing through the state legislature threatens to make the job of him and other election officials even more difficult, Kidd said.
If HB 1464 is passed, HB 1464 would establish the Georgia Bureau of Investigation as the first responder to all allegations of election-related crimes, authorize the public to inspect paper ballots after the election, and allow only the state Elections Committee, rather than the counties, to private accept donations intended for the election administration to distribute at their discretion.
“All of this impacts the recruitment and retention of our campaign workers,” Kidd said.
County election officials are struggling to recruit and train largely new employees at a time when Georgia will be in the national limelight as a key swing state. The all-important midterm elections will come under close scrutiny under new, tougher state legislation the Republican-led legislature enacted last year with the aim of making elections more transparent while increasing public confidence in the electoral process.
“The electoral process itself is a confusing process. It is difficult to interpret conflicting laws in cases. You have the right to vote. They have Attorney General decisions,” Kidd said.
As a result, he said, it typically takes at least three or four election cycles for someone to become familiar with managing a polling station. “We don’t currently have anyone who has been with us for three election cycles.”
Douglas County set up mock districts to familiarize new poll workers, who earn about $270 a day, with the voting process for the May midterm elections. Despite the training, Kidd concedes, there will likely be some “paperwork errors” — and the public will have little regard for the fact that these are temp workers who are “first-timers on the job.”
“If people had a better understanding of what we actually do for a living, we would all be in better shape,” Bartow County Elections Commissioner Joseph Kirk told Atlanta Civic Circle.
Kirk said he’s “blessed to have a good bond of campaign workers,” but it takes several training sessions to bring it up to speed
Unintended Consequences
In addition, recent and forthcoming changes to electoral laws that shift control from counties to the Georgia State Board of Elections will have “unintended consequences,” he predicted.
In his 20 years in electoral administration, Kirk said, “We started with a simple concept [where] If you are eligible to vote, register. You cast your vote. We count them. We report the results. We’re done.”
Now, he added, the process is “a very complex set of laws that requires a lot of interpretation and a lot of decisions because elections in Georgia are conducted at the county level, not the state level.”
In Bartow County, for example, the Chamber of Commerce typically provides the Elections Office with use of its premises free of charge on Election Day.
But HB 1464 would prevent them from doing so, he said. “Now they have to charge me for something. I don’t even care about the money. It’s about the partnerships that foster such deals.”
The Georgia Election Integrity Law (SB 202), passed last year, prohibits private donations to local election offices. But a provision in HB 1464 would allow the state electoral commission to receive and distribute private donations as it sees fit.
“This is new and unprecedented territory,” said Kidd, Douglas Elections Officer. “This is a downright attack on the electoral process.”
The ban on private monetary and material donations will hit the Douglas electoral office hard.
Over the past two years, the Office has received approximately $3 million in donations and grants from outside donors, including former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Center for Tech and Civic Life, a nonprofit organization that received $350 million from Meta (formerly Facebook) CEO Mark Zuckerberg received to support local electoral offices nationally.
The Douglas office used the money to rent moving trucks, pay incentives to election workers, and make capital improvements.
But donations to district electoral offices are history – at least for the time being. In an effort to boost public confidence in the election process, lawmakers have created “a number of unfunded mandates,” Kidd said.
In the future, find out how endless requests from the public for ballots are processed and paid, polling stations, equipment and other administrative costs are paid for.
“They add more and more requirements, restrictions and duties to the office without allocating resources [new] features,” Kidd said.
