IN-DEPTH COVERAGE
In the wake of a series of elections errors last year, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution dug deep into issues surrounding the Fulton County Registration and Elections Department. By poring over documents, analyzing voter spreadsheets and interviewing experts, county officials, poll workers and voters, the AJC has exposed flaws in the department’s handling of elections and with the oversight board’s hiring of former Director Sam Westmoreland. This story looks at new Director Rick Barron’s efforts to overhaul the office and his firing of former interim Director Sharon Mitchell.
Fulton County has a backlog of thousands of unprocessed voter registrations — the same type of gaffe that set off a chain reaction of failures during the November presidential election.
The lapse has been caught in time to fix before this November’s mayoral and city council races, but it raises questions about what kind of leadership the elections department has been under during the past year.
New elections chief Rick Barron said he discovered last month that about 14,000 applications hadn’t been keyed into the state’s data system, which allows voters to use touch-screen machines when they show up at polls.
Barron has had staff working overtime to catch up. They’ve whittled the applications down to 3,500, which the director said he expects to have entered by Monday.
He also fired Sharon Mitchell, who served as interim department director during last year’s election and had been one of his top administrators, overseeing registrations.
Whether he took the action because of the backlog or for other reasons isn’t clear. Barron wouldn’t elaborate, and elections board members said they don’t know the full story. Mitchell did not respond to voice messages left on her cellphone.
Axing her is perhaps the most dramatic change Barron has made so far. He started the job in mid-June after spending six years as elections administrator in Williamson County in central Texas.
Fulton’s Registration and Elections Board, which hired Barron, is counting on him to overhaul a department that has been plagued with problems for years — frustrating voters and prompting multiple state investigations.
“My goal is to get this department organized and up to date,” Barron said, “and there are some things that have to be done on time.”
At stake is the integrity of Fulton’s elections process and whether the state’s largest county has an elections department — budgeted at $2.4 million this year — capable of accommodating every voter.
In last year’s July primary, hundreds of voters wound up with the wrong state House and Senate races.
In the presidential election, thousands of registered voters didn’t appear on voter rolls because of slow data processing. Precincts ran out of paper ballots, creating long lines as poll workers waited for more ballots.
Some voters gave up and left.
Secretary of State Brian Kemp is still investigating last year’s troubles.
In April, Mitchell told Fulton elections board members that her staff had been spending so much time responding to requests from state investigators, they had fallen behind in keying in applications. Barron said he could not address that assertion for legal reasons.
However, he said another staff member gave him a different explanation: In February, they stopped keying in applications coming from the state Department of Driver Services — apparently because the system wasn’t automatically entering some data fields properly.
When the state’s new voter registration system went live in July, Barron said, he could see how many pending applications hadn’t been entered.
“It’s hard to piece together what happened,” Barron said. “Once you stop processing, and you’re getting 300 to 500 per day, you can see how they could build up over time.”
The unprocessed applications were all made after last year’s election, and no elections have been held yet this year.
Still, the department keeping thousands of people off the rolls so close to the launch of early voting in mid-October is alarming, League of Women Voters of Georgia President Elizabeth Poythress said.
“When people go to vote, they need to be able to vote without any disenfranchisement,” she said. “They don’t need any barriers put up. That’s what happened last year.”
Jared Thomas, a spokesman for Kemp, said no other county has gotten this far behind that he’s aware of. No other county reported similar problems with Driver Services applications, either, he said.
Mitchell worked for the county for about two years. She started running the elections department in September after the last director, Sam Westmoreland, resigned while jailed for failing to follow sentencing terms from two prescription-drug-related DUI arrests.
Mitchell staunchly defended the department’s November performance, characterizing it as a good election with minor problems overblown by the news media.
Fulton County Commissioner Robb Pitts said he has no objection to Mitchell being terminated.
“If we’re going to hold (Barron) accountable, we need to give him the freedom he needs to put a team in place,” Pitts said. “My guess is, he’s not through.”
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