POLITICSElection Monitors Nervously Practice for the ‘Big Dance in November’
Georgia’s May primary tested voter engagement groups and political parties. If the upcoming presidential election is like the championship game, consider last month’s primary in Georgia the scrimmage.
Just after 3 p.m. on the third Tuesday of May, Lamont Hart began his shift outside a suburban precinct as a scorching Georgia sun reflected heat off the white-bricked Worship with Wonders Church.
Tall, thin, wearing a backward flat cap and holding a notebook, Hart introduced himself to exiting voters and asked whether they’d had any issues casting their ballots.
“Went smooth,” he heard. “All good.” “Easy-peasy.”
Not everything would go perfectly, though, during Hart’s four-hour stint volunteering with the New Georgia Project. His job was to circulate among a handful of precincts, some 20 miles outside Atlanta, to check on voter access. Did folks understand their ballots? Could they even get to the right place to vote?
Georgia is one of the battleground states that will determine who is elected president in November. Since losing the 2020 election, Republican former President Donald Trump has made false claims of widespread voter fraud, and he has been charged in Georgia with felony conspiracy for urging state leaders to “find” the nearly 12,000 votes he needed to overtake Democrat Joe Biden in the state.
New voting ID laws, mail disruptions that could delay absentee ballots, confusion about redistricting — any one of them could sway a close election. Voter access groups around the country are working to ensure that on Nov. 5, every person who wants to have a say will be able to.
If the upcoming presidential election is like the championship game, consider last month’s primary in Georgia the scrimmage.
‘Our Trial Run’
Early on Tuesday morning, May 21, on the first floor of an Atlanta office building surrounded by highway overpasses, activists with the New Georgia Project buzzed in and out of a conference room stocked with a breakfast platter of pastries, fruit and coffee, and a cooler full of enough Cokes and peach iced teas to caffeinate the civic engagement group for the next 10 hours.
Georgians were making choices in a general primary with few contested races, so not many people were expected to turn out. It was relatively calm out there, a perfect day to test the system.
At 9 a.m., two hours after polls opened, CEO Kendra Davenport Cotton rallied nine of her cohort in the conference room and 30 others across the state on a Zoom call displayed on a large screen.
Their mission, Cotton told everyone, was to monitor the election statewide.
