During a shorter counting window in Georgia, watchers in Morgan County discovered that a newly deployed ballot scanner-and-tabulator machine (Dominion's ImageCast) was not detecting a handful of votes on absentee ballots (there were erratically inked Xs instead of clearer filled-in ovals). The same issue was seen in several other counties, underscoring prior doubts about trusting the results from the newest generation of voting technology.
Three Republican congressional candidates in the state's 6th district wrote a joint letter on June 17 to county election officials asking them to reexamine the ballots before certifying the results, said Garland Favorito of VoterGA.org, who added that the absence of auditing the primary results was "the most serious issue."
"Georgia counties are now set to certify election results without resolving adjudication errors and verifying the system counted all mail-votes correctly," he said. "Mail-in votes represent about 40 percent of the votes cast."
These tech-based issues were not confined to mail-in balloting. The same new technology used to check in voters at polling places in Georgia's June 9 primary and in Los Angeles's March 3 primaryso-called e-poll booksalso confounded poll workers and voters, though for somewhat different reasons. In LA, the e-poll books from KnowInk had trouble syncing with California's voter database (a problem in 15 counties across the state), and poll workers also said a directory to look up a voter's registration was not expedient.
In Georgia, there were also widespread reports of poll workers not being familiar with how to use the new poll books -- as well as the new ballot-marking computers.
A former executive of a voting technology company who said that he had talked to one Georgia official overseeing the deployment of its new voting system said that the state never retrained poll workers after it twice postponed its primary, and then, because of COVID-19's social distancing, had to use fewer in-person voting machines than would have been optimal. In other words, there were fewer poll workers willing to work in a pandemic, and they forgot what they learned.
Whether states and other jurisdictions -- like Washington, D.C., or LA County -- will heed the lessons from the primary remains to be seen. In Washington's preliminary post-primary report, the board of elections pledged to do better for the fall -- if it is given resources to do so.
"Holding an election [primary] under these conditions was uncharted territory and forced us to condense 18 months of planning into less than eight weeks as a result of COVID-19," it said. "While we acknowledge there were significant challenges, we now have a clearer vision of how to proceed for the [fall] general election."
But elsewhere, such as in red-run states like Ohio, partisan legislators appear to be going in the opposite direction. On June 10, Ohio's House passed H.B. 680, which, among other things, moved up the deadline for voters to return postmarked mail-in ballots -- to one week ahead of November 3's Election Day. In most states, that deadline falls on Election Day, the same day as in-person voting.
Should that bill become law, the change of the timetable will add to pressures facing voters -- from navigating the process to issues with new technology -- that, taken together, add complexity rather than simplify voting.
This article was produced by Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
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