Gwinnett County, Georgia, agreed over the weekend to contact voters who never received the absentee ballots they requested and to send replacements by overnight mail, after civil rights lawyers sued on behalf of as many as 1,820 voters days before the November 3 election.
The complaint, Huntington v. Williams, was filed in Gwinnett County Superior Court in the early hours of October 30. The named plaintiff, Nathan Doyle Huntington, is a third year student at Niagara University in New York who says he cannot get home to vote in person. He sued on behalf of himself and 1,819 other registered Gwinnett voters. His lawyers come from the Southern Poverty Law Center, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the ACLU and the ACLU of Georgia, according to the ACLU of Georgia.
What Georgia law requires
Georgia voters can request an absentee ballot for any reason, and the deadline for this election was October 23, the complaint says. During advance voting, which ran from October 13 to October 30, county registrars must mail or issue a ballot within three days of receiving a timely application under Georgia Code section 21-2-384, as the Cobb County complaint also lays out. Ballots must be back in election officials' hands by Election Day.
The complaint says the problem centers on ballots marked as issued on or after October 6 in Gwinnett, Cobb and DeKalb counties. It cites local reporting that identified Fort Orange Press as the mailing vendor for all three counties, and it says Gwinnett outsourced its mailing to an out of state private vendor. The ACLU of Georgia says the delays may affect nearly 10,000 voters across the three counties.
Our numbers on the return rates
The complaint compares return rates, using Secretary of State data, for absentee ballots supposedly issued between October 6 and October 16. Statewide, 67.1 percent had come back. In Gwinnett the figure was 28.3 percent, in Cobb 31.1 percent and in DeKalb 26.4 percent.
By our arithmetic, Gwinnett trails the state average by 38.8 percentage points, Cobb by 36.0 points and DeKalb by 40.7 points. Put another way, voters statewide had returned those ballots at about 2.4 times Gwinnett's rate. A low return rate alone does not prove a ballot never arrived, but a gap that size across three neighboring counties using the same vendor is the core of the lawsuits' evidence.
The two complaints together name up to 4,720 voters, 1,820 in Gwinnett and about 2,900 in Cobb. That is just under half of the roughly 10,000 the ACLU of Georgia estimates for all three counties.
How the cases ended
The Gwinnett suit asked the court to order overnight ballots with prepaid return postage by 1 p.m. on October 31, notice to affected voters, and counting of affected ballots postmarked by November 3 and received by November 6. On Saturday the county agreed to contact voters who had not returned their ballots, tell them they can get a replacement, send it overnight and pay return postage, Democracy Docket reported. The reported terms do not mention extending the receipt deadline.
"No voter should lose their voice because an absentee ballot they requested never made it to their mailbox," said Will Hughes of the ACLU Voting Rights Project. Raneem Ashrawi of the ACLU of Georgia said voters "should be able to count on their government to do the bare minimum the law requires: Mail absentee ballots on time."
Cobb went first. A voter named Michael Olaribigbe sued the Cobb County elections board on October 27, saying about 2,900 voters were affected and that more than 86 percent of ballots issued from October 6 to October 15 had not been returned. The next day the board said affected voters could request a new ballot by priority express mail with a prepaid return envelope, and the plaintiff voluntarily dismissed the case. In DeKalb, officials agreed to contact voters who had not returned ballots, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
DeKalb is also one of the five counties where the NAACP has asked a federal judge to keep federal law enforcement personnel out of Election Day monitoring. For voters outside Georgia, the week's other big ballot fight is the Justice Department's request to the Supreme Court over 20,000 California ballots, which follows Judge Carter's refusal to order them set aside.
Two Taps News stories summarize reporting and the analysis discussed on Two Taps and Friends. They are not legal advice. Read our standards.
