Gwinnett County is gearing up for next month’s primary and nonpartisan vote with relatively little time to handle an unprecedented level of legislative changes that have unique effects on Georgia’s second-largest county.
Almost 620,000 people were registered to vote in Gwinnett as of last month — and almost every one of them will be voting in a new congressional, state legislative or county commission district this year. That also means each registered voter will receive this month new precinct cards, which by federal law must be printed in both English and Spanish.
“If only state lawmakers worked in county government,” said Nicole Love Hendrickson, chairwoman of the Gwinnett County Board of Commissioners.
The complications began when the coronavirus pandemic delayed the United States census, which then delayed the redistricting process.
The congressional, state House and state Senate districts in Gwinnett changed significantly after a special legislative session in the fall. Then in February, the state’s Republican majority drastically redrew the county commission map and bumped Gwinnett’s school board elections forward from November to May.
“It used to be three to four weeks that the elections office would need to reassign all the voters into the right district and make sure they have the right combination of ballots,” Gwinnett County Elections Supervisor Zach Manifold said. “This year, we had a week and a half to get that done.”
These are also the first elections Gwinnett has handled since Senate Bill 202 took effect with sweeping changes to how voting is conducted in Georgia.
Unlike in many other counties, Gwinnett’s elections department does not run municipal elections, or the test run would have come last year. The law imposes new identification requirements for absentee ballots, an earlier deadline to request them and prohibitions against counting provisional ballots in the wrong precincts unless they’re cast after 5 p.m. on election day.
Regular absentee ballots will be sent out starting April 25, which is also the voter registration deadline for the midterm election. Voters can request them until May 13.
Gwinnett contracted Fort Orange Press again this year to print and mail absentee ballots and envelopes — in both English and Spanish — for $1 million.
Many of the absentee ballots were delayed in 2020 after the county increased envelope sizes in response to a court settlement that required larger type. Under SB 202, however, the envelope has different text and is back to standard size, Manifold said.
Former Gwinnett Elections Supervisor Kristi Royston now works for Fort Orange Press as a client service representative for the Southeast.
Three other companies bid on the absentee ballot contract but were disqualified because they were not on a state list of qualified printers or could not meet the required turnaround time for processing and mailing ballots, according to county documents.
Gwinnett — the most diverse county in the Southeast — also committed to distributing many educational election materials this year in Asian languages. Residents will receive election information in this month’s water bill in English, Spanish, Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese. Consolidated sample ballots will be posted to the county website in all those languages, Manifold said.
To assign all voters to the correct districts before qualifying ended March 11, the county for the first time used Geographic Information System data to map the county by precinct and layer districts over each other, Manifold said. The old process was largely manual, with staffers going through 15,000 street segments on huge printed maps for congressional, state House, state Senate, county commission and school board districts, he said.
The county will not redraw precinct boundaries until next year, Manifold said, but about 10 polling locations have changed. There are more advance in-person voting locations this year.
Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC
Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC
Gwinnett is recruiting poll workers and has begun training them. County leaders hope for increased numbers after many sat out the last two years due to COVID-19 concerns.
Grant Christopher, a 37-year-old freelance writer and editor, worked the 2020 general election and January 2021 runoff at Lawrenceville First Baptist Church before training last week to be a poll manager.
“I just feel it’s important,” he said. “I figured I had the time and there wasn’t a good reason not to. I feel more engaged as a citizen.”
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