Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) vowed to launch an investigation into the chaos during Tuesday’s primary elections that saw long lines and confusion in parts of the state.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe voting situation today in certain precincts in Fulton and Dekalb counties is unacceptable,\u201d Raffensperger said in a statement. \u201cMy office has opened an investigation to determine what these counties need to do to resolve these issues before November\u2019s election.\u201d<\/p>\n
New machines:<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0Tuesday\u2019s elections saw one of the first major tests for Georgia\u2019s new voting systems, which were bought by the state following a federal ruling last year that required Georgia to phase out paperless voting machines by 2020.<\/p>\n Many voting issues on Tuesday stemmed from these new machines, provided as part of a multimillion dollar contract with Dominion Voting Systems.<\/p>\n \u201cObviously, the first time a new voting system is used there is going to be a learning curve, and voting in a pandemic only increased these difficulties,\u201d Raffensperger acknowledged. \u201cBut every other county faced these same issues and were significantly better prepared to respond so that voters had every opportunity to vote.”<\/p>\n Kay Stimson, the vice president of Government Affairs at Dominion, told The Hill that the company had a \u201ccommand center\u201d in Georgia and had \u201cteams deployed around the state\u201d to respond to any reported issues with Dominion equipment.<\/p>\n Many of the reported concerns were in Fulton County, which encompasses much of central Atlanta. Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms (D) tweeted that at one point \u201cnone of the machines\u201d in one precinct were working.<\/p>\n Stimson said that in Fulton County, one issue stemmed from the delivery of \u201cpoll pads\u201d used to check voters in, and pointed to issues with \u201cconsolidating polling places last minute\u201d due to changes from the COVID-19 pandemic.<\/p>\n Voter suppression concerns:<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0Raffensperger announced the investigation in the midst of strong criticism from officials including former Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) that the confusion was leading to \u201cvoter suppression.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25811","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-u-s-a"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25811","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=25811"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25811\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25813,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25811\/revisions\/25813"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25811"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=25811"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=25811"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}