Cobb County spent more than $200,000 to rush absentee ballots to voters in the days before the Nov. 5 presidential election after processing issues threatened to disenfranchise thousands of residents.
The county paid, on average, roughly $60 to ship each of the 3,419 ballots it sent out late, according to records obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in response to an open-records request. An absentee ballot normally costs 97 cents to mail, but Cobb had to pay for expedited shipping each way to give voters a chance to return their ballots on time.
The costly episode exposed flaws in how Cobb — Georgia’s third-largest county — manages requests for absentee ballots, and it may lead to changes in how the county handles future elections. Cobb election director Tate Fall said she was studying how to revamp the system to avoid a repeat.
Fall said her office struggled to handle a last-minute surge in absentee requests, and it was running three days behind when the company that usually prints Cobb’s absentee ballots sent out its final batch. Once her staff caught up, they found the county’s ballot printer wasn’t working, Fall said.
By law, counties have three days to mail absentee ballots after voters apply for them, meaning the last ones should have been sent by Oct. 28. The U.S. Postal Service has said it received some Cobb ballots as late as the Saturday before Election day — five days after the deadline.
That posed a problem for the affected voters. Under Georgia law, absentee votes aren’t supposed to count if they arrive after the polls close on Election Day, so they had scant time to make their choices and send their ballots back.
To account for the delay, Cobb sent ballots via UPS overnight and USPS Express Mail, and it paid for express return labels.
Fall said some 79% of the voters impacted by absentee delays ultimately managed to have their votes counted, even though fewer than half of the affected ballots were returned before the normal Election Day deadline.
Nearly 600 of the voters turned out to the polls and voted in person instead, Fall said, and a Cobb superior court judge ruled that hundreds more ballots that arrived later in the week would still count.
The 431 late-arriving ballots threatened to be a flashpoint in the legal battles over Georgia’s election results.
After a group of voters represented by the American Civil Liberties Union and Southern Poverty Law Center successfully sued to extend the deadline, the Georgia Republican Party and Republican National Committee asked the state Supreme Court to enforce the original Election Day cutoff. Cobb has become an increasingly reliable stronghold for Democrats in recent elections, and nearly 57% of Cobb voters supported Vice President Kamala Harris this year.
The Republican groups dropped their challenge the day after statewide results showed a decisive win for President-elect Donald Trump in Georgia, allowing the contested ballots to be counted.
Fall, who became election director last December, said the Cobb elections office would take steps to make its vote-by-mail operation more efficient in the future. The county couldn’t keep up with the rush of last-minute absentee applications, she said, even though Cobb’s vote-by-mail processing center was fully staffed in the run-up to the election.
That’s partly because some workers were fielding questions from callers rather than processing applications, Fall said. To keep them freed up, she planned to assemble a call center for future elections.
And she said Cobb officials hoped to glean insights from how other counties process absentee applications. For instance, she said, they have been visiting counties with runoff elections to see how their processes work and asking officials in other areas for advice.
The goal, Fall said, is to “completely rebuild our process to ensure this doesn’t happen again.”
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