ATLANTA — In a telephone press briefing, leaders from All Voting is Local, Asian Americans Advancing Justice, the Coalition for the People’s Agenda, Common Cause Georgia, the Georgia Association of Latino Elected Officials, Georgia NAACP, and the New Georgia Project, urged Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and State Election Board members to do their job to ensure the devastating failures of Tuesday’s primary are not repeated in November.
Raffensperger and state officials denied counties the necessary resources to run free and fair elections, silencing voters, many of them Black and Brown.
Despite postponing the election twice, the state officials failed to prepare, resulting in chaos including: more than 7 hour wait times to cast a ballot, polling places not having basic equipment like ballot paper or functional voting machines, and police showing up at polling places to attempt to remove volunteers who were helping voters.
“Institutional racism is alive – we need not look further than our failing elections,” said Aklima Khondoker, Georgia state director of All Voting is Local.
“We have to ensure that our election officials do the job and the proper planning that they should have done, so that we would not have these barriers in our communities,” said Helen Butler, executive director of the Georgia Coalition for the People’s Agenda.
