ATLANTA, Ga. — Civil rights groups have asked a court to order emergency help for more than 1,800 Gwinnett County voters who say the absentee ballots they requested for Tuesday’s election never showed up.
The complaint, filed Friday against Gwinnett’s elections board, was brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Georgia, the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Legal Defense Fund on behalf of a county voter. It covers 1,819 other registered voters whose ballots were late, most of them issued after Oct. 6, and it says the county’s return rate has fallen far below the state average as a result.
The trouble is not limited to one county. The groups say mail ballot delays have also hit Cobb and DeKalb, touching about 10,000 voters across three of the state’s largest and most diverse counties at a time when Georgia’s races for governor and U.S. Senate are drawing national attention.
An earlier suit against Cobb County blamed Fort Orange Press, a New York printing company that handles mail ballots for all three counties. Cobb has since agreed to send replacement ballots overnight. Missing-ballot complaints have also surfaced in New York, Pennsylvania and Colorado counties that use the same vendor.
In Gwinnett, the groups want the board to overnight a ballot, with prepaid overnight return postage, to every affected voter still waiting. They also want the county to notify voters of their options and to count any affected ballot postmarked by Nov. 3 that arrives by Nov. 6, which is also the legal cutoff to fix absentee ballot problems and to receive ballots from overseas and military voters.
The court had not ruled as of the filing. Gwinnett voters still waiting on a ballot can call the county elections board at 678-226-7210 or email [email protected] to request one by overnight mail.
Statewide, any voter holding an absentee ballot can also skip the mail entirely by hand-delivering it to the county registrar before polls close at 7 p.m. on Election Day, or by taking it to their precinct to be canceled and voting in person.
