For years the State of Georgia has been accused of voter suppression and racial bias.
Tuesday’s election has spawned similar allegations after reports of long lines at majority minority voting precincts, problems with new voting machines, and a shortage of ballots.
Georgia’s chief election official, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, said in a statement that his office “has opened an investigation to determine what these counties” such as Fulton and DeKalb “need to do to resolve these issues before November’s election.”
DeKalb County CEO Michael Thurmond though, says “the buck stops at the Secretary of State’s office” and that “he must be held accountable.” In what he terms the election a ‘metrowide and statewide dysfunction’, Thurmond is calling for a statewide investigation. He says it’s “so that we can look objectively and critically at this system that we’re now under and determine what went wrong, how to address the problems, and insure that they don’t repeat themselves in November and in coming years”
After visiting various precincts in Atlanta Tuesday, Atlanta NAACP President Richard Rose called the election “an orchestrated catastrophic fiasco.”