(Washington Insider Magazine) –Voters in Fulton County, Georgia will be going to the polls to elect a new mayor, City Council members, and several other municipal officials on November 2. Unfortunately, some of those who show up may discover that their names are not on the voting roster.
Last week, two Georgia election workers were accused of shredding unprocessed voting applications in Fulton County, the state’s most populous county. On Monday, officials from Fulton County released a statement detailing the accusations and announcing that the two workers had been let go. According to the preliminary review conducted by the county, the two workers allegedly checked out batches of voting applications, but instead of processing them, they shredded them. Richard Barron, Fulton County’s Registration and Elections Director, says that the fraud took place at some point over the past two weeks.
Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, as many as 300 municipal election-related applications were destroyed by the two workers. After coworkers discovered what had happened, they reported the two election workers who were immediately fired.
Since Georgia voters do not enroll by party, none of the applications included party affiliations. In addition, Fulton County spokesperson Jessica Corbitt said that the application may not have been completely lost, since there was uncertainty regarding what process the applications went through before they were checked out and shredded.
Nevertheless, the incident threatened to further erode trust in the county’s election system. Raffensperger asked the Justice Department to investigate Fulton County and its handling of the upcoming election. Concerning the issue, he said, “After 20 years of documented failure in Fulton County elections, Georgians are tired of waiting to see what the next embarrassing revelation will be.” He also noted that his office had already begun their own probe into the alleged incident.
This incident is only the latest in a string of issues that have plagued Fulton County’s elections. Historically, the county has been accused of offering insufficient voting places, leading to long lines. In addition, there have been accusations of inefficient reporting strategies.
Currently, Fulton County is under investigation after the State Election Board voted unanimously to create a bipartisan panel that would review the county’s handling of recent elections. Along with this panel, in 2020 Raffensperger required the county to have a state-appointed monitor that would oversee its elections. After the election, the monitor reported that he did not find any evidence of fraud; however, he did note that there were “significant mismanagement issues in Fulton County’s elections processes.”
