ATLANTA — In a district that serves as a bellwether for Georgia - which itself could prove a bellwether for the nation - Fulton County elections officials have taken stock of some of the lessons learned from a disastrous primary day and are looking ahead with cautious optimism to November.
There remain points of concern, following runoff voting last week that was not without some of the same hiccups from June. But it went a lot better. And in their meeting Thursday, the Fulton County Board of Elections outlined a laundry list of logistical priorities that, if addressed, they hope will see Georgia's most populous voting precinct avoid a repeat of the June 9 primaries when the mother of all Election Days arrives in November.
The biggest key to it all may be the voting that happens before Election Day.
In addition to the the issues that have been well-documented at the county level, and which a number of public comments re-hashed on Thursday - namely, there not being enough polling sites and either too few or inadequately trained poll workers at them - the board looked at how mail-in voting will function for the presidential election.
It is an issue forcing its way to the center of the national struggle over how the November vote will play out, with President Trump generally opposing its widespread use.
Fulton County Elections Director Richard Barron said during the meeting that something like two-thirds of voters in last week's runoffs voted early in-person or by mail, called absentee voting in Georgia.
Barron said that 33,077 people had voted early and 33,177 people voted in person on election day.
The most-used form of ballot was the absentee mail-in ballot, he said, of which 36,236 were cast for the runoffs.
"The landscape is definitely changing. I don't see, after even post-COVID, that this is gonna change back. I think absentee is here to stay in a big way," Barron said.
He added that he thinks as many as 80% of votes could be cast in Fulton County before Election Day itself.
That came the same day the president said he did not support additional funding for the postal service, seeing it as an avenue to expanded mail-in voting, generally favored by Democrats. Trump argues it will be vulnerable to fraud.
Barron addressed both the issue of the postal service - saying he had people "higher up the chain" at the USPS offering help with Fulton County to ensure a smooth voting process - and the potential for vote overlap, raised by another member of the board.
The elections director outlined how the absentee ballot request system utilizes a state system, ElectioNet, to track ballots and make sure only one person is able to cast one vote. If you were to send in two requests, and through confusion or technical error or some other means, two ballots were sent to a person, the system would only consider the most recent one "live" for when they're received and scanned as votes.
Absentee ballots will be mailed out as soon as Sept. 15 for the November general election, after the state election board approved this week an online absentee ballot request portal.
The county is working on its own parallel online absentee request portal, as well, Barron said. The state encouraged it to do so to and it will serve as something as a backup to the state system.
One concern Barron expressed with the mail-in process is potential timing. He said Georgia allows people to send in their requests later than most other states, which can put a burden on the county to turn it around and send the ballot to a voter in time.
Voters who get their ballot late sometimes think they won't be able to mail it back in time, and then head to the polls to try to cast that ballot. The process of canceling that ballot and having the person vote there on-site helped contribute to delays in June.
He was hoping more ballot drop boxes would help with that issue (and he said he raised the idea of manned drop boxes at polling sites on Election Day for people bringing their ballot, but that he was led to believe state rules would not ultimately allow that).
According to Barron, something like 1-in-6 or 1-in-7 people who returned an absentee ballot did so with a drop box. They're hoping to increase the number of current boxes from 20 to 35-50, with the help of grant money they've applied for.
There are other issues still to address with in-person voting, of course. One of the main problems Barron hopes he has a solution for was with the poll pads - the check-in devices that sort of upload your voting information onto the voter card you take to the electronic machines.
Those devices require a massive data update ahead of the election, and the warehouse the county stores them in does not currently have a lot of bandwidth to perform that update. Barron said they're working to upgrade the bandwidth so that can be done much faster.
As for the poll pads themselves, he said the county had just received 200 and had ordered 200 more, which will eventually give them 1,200 total.
"We will have enough poll pads in the field for November," he said.
Improving the training the poll workers, which he acknowledged has some "deficiencies," is also a priority. At least two poll workers from last week called in with public comments and said training had been inadequate, and in particular the 10-question final test poll workers were given seemed like "something that just about anybody could pass."
"We will definitely be working to get that improved between now and the November election," he said.
He also said there was a plan to have technicians in place at every polling site to assist with equipment. Last week he said there were seven sites that initially did not have a technician - who work for third-party vendors - because they simply did not show up. He said a different vendor supplied backup technicians to those sites, and only one notable delay was recorded at a polling site, at Buckhead Library.
Barron said he would be meeting with the different vendors to determine why that happened and what the best plan for November will be.
After a great deal of rancor earlier this summer, there seemed a more settled air over the board - likely helped by runoff elections that saw far fewer voters than in June.
For now, though, last week has given Fulton County a burst of optimism that the preparations will be solidly in place for the presidential election.
"We're doing these incremental steps, and I think we made a lot of progress between June and August," Barron said. "I do think it's encouraging."
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