Fulton, still counting ballots, may have violated law
Secretary of State Karen Handel told WAGA-TV Fox 5 that the county had violated election law by allowing its workers to go home before the count was completed after polls closed Tuesday. Under state law, workers involved in counting absentee ballots are required to be sequestered.
On Election Day, county election workers began arriving at 5:30 a.m. They were sent home around 3:30 a.m. Wednesday, county election officials said. Four hours later, they returned and resumed counting.You know, these aren't volunteers we're talking about, but full time staff who routinely deal with Election related materials. Counting will continue tomorrow, which means staff would have been sequestered for 3 days. Too bad the AJC now seems to be carrying water for the SOS. First they reported 40,000 Absentee Ballots remained to be counted, then the story was changed (without notation) to 12,000, then again to 11,000, now it's back to 30,000. Some scoop they got there. Helping to hammer exhausted Election workers. Nice.Mark Henderson, Fulton's election education coordinator, said the workers needed to rest, and Fulton county commissioners made the call to send them home.
Comments (10)
Hey, but at least they didn't get a free cup of coffee.
I have a feeling that she will do whatever it takes to keep her name in the news from now until the 2010 elections.
I hate to say it, but she may be right on this one. The Fulton guys should either have been pre-counting the early votes or gotten ready with cots and supplies.
RFK Jr. would view this kind of thing with great suspicion if ballots "disappeared" in this time period.
odin, they aren't allowed to start opening the ballots until 7:00am on Election Day. Until then, they are secured, just as I'm sure they are every evening.
And you're right DG. Maybe we should start calling her Georgia's Sarah Palin instead of Georgia's Katherine Harris.
and what I heard is that the Dem observers were there on time at 7AM and that the Republicans didn't show until late afternoon!
Ignorant question - on the SOS website, are they counting the early votes and/or absentees as separate precincts? There seem to be missing votes from about every county, even the small ones.
WTF is going on?
Early votes are divided into two categories: Absentee by mail and In-person. I think (but don't know for a fact), that all the In-person Early votes have been counted, but the Absentee by mail ballots are the slowest to process.
I am super pissed at the Fulton election officials. The early voting on Pryor Street was entirely mismanaged. After the first day, they should have brought it way more voting machines and people to certify. The lines in early voting scared the voters who weren't as fired up and resulted a turnout 20% less than expected.
While it wouldn't surprise me if the vote counting in Fulton wasn't handled very well, ultimately the goal is to get the votes counted as accurately as possible. It's one thing to find a technical violation during a campaign and make a candidate pay, but this is about counting votes. Even if there were technical violations, if there is no evidence of tampering or other miscounting, the sanction should be to improve the procedure, not some sort of political punishment.
I agree MOTS. It was a cluster. Dekalb had less than half the locations of Fulton for Early/Advance voting, but still processed 10,000 more voters.