Cobb County, Georgia, will add two more locations for the final week of early voting in the Senate runoff races after voting and civil rights advocates criticized changes they said would harm Black and Latino voters’ access to the polls.
In a news release announcing the move Wednesday, the county said it was “responding to concerns” over its initial plan to reduce the number of early voting locations to just five sites total for the Jan. 5 runoffs, down from 11 that were operational ahead of November’s general election.
Cobb County is the state’s third most populous county, with more than 760,000 residents.
There will now be five sites for the first two weeks of early voting and seven sites for the final week, when the county adds back sites in Smyrna and Marietta. Staff will be immediately trained to run those two sites, according to the release.
The county will also move a planned early voting site at the Ward Recreation Center to the Ron Anderson Community Center. Both are in the city of Powder Springs, but the new site is in an area with a greater share of Black voters, according to the groups that protested the reductions.
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Those groups, which include Georgia branches of the NAACP and the American Civil Liberties Union, wrote in a letter Monday to local officials, calling on them to maintain 11 early voting sites for the runoff.
“While these closures are likely to adversely affect many Cobb County voters, we are especially concerned that these closures will be harmful to Cobb County’s Black and Latinx voters because many of the locations are in Black and Latinx communities,” they said on Monday.
Cobb County Elections Director Janine Eveler blamed staffing issues for the cuts.
“Between COVID, the workload, and the holidays, we have simply run out of people,” Eveler said in Wednesday’s release. “Many workers told us they spent three weeks working 14- or 15-hour days and they will not do that again. We simply don’t have time to bring in and train up more workers to staff the number of locations we had for November.”
The county also defended the cuts by saying that voters would spend less time at the polls in a runoff with just two races on the ballot, whereas the general election had more contests for voters to deliberate.
Cobb was one of four sizable Georgia counties to reduce the number of early voting sites.
Forsyth County, Georgia, downsized from 11 to five voting sites. County Republicans celebrated the closures in a Facebook post on Tuesday, saying they’d attended a recent meeting of election officials to defend against a Democratic “scheme” to add more hours or sites. In the post, they argued without evidence that additional early voting opportunities that would have created opportunity for “more fraud.”
Many state Republican lawmakers, including the Georgia GOP, have repeated President Donald Trump’s repeated, false claims that voter fraud robbed him of a second term, even as election officials, outside experts, and Trump’s own attorney general, William Barr, say there was no widespread voter fraud.
On Tuesday, Georgia Republicans called for tossing the no-excuse absentee voting system they created in 2005. Early voting was hugely popular in Georgia’s November election, particularly among Democrats, and President-elect Joe Biden flipped the state blue for the first time since 1992.
Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has also argued in favor of additional voting restrictions, but he’s reiterated that there is no evidence of widespread fraud or a stolen election.
“I know there are people that are convinced the election was fraught with problems, but the evidence, the actual evidence, the facts tell us a different story,” he said on Monday.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
