A judge ruled Friday that more than 3,000 Cobb County voters who received their absentee ballots late will have a few extra days to return them after civil rights groups sued to extend the deadline.
Cobb County saw a surge in the number of absentee ballot requests late last week. The requests came in too late for the state’s approved printing vendor, so the county had to switch to using its own printing equipment. But those machines were not working and had to be fixed, which caused the delay, a Cobb County Board of Elections attorney said.
County officials said they were taking “extraordinary measures” to ensure voters receive the ballots, and they scrambled to ship the outstanding ballots through express and overnight mail by Friday — the last day of early voting.
The ballots were to be returned by 7 p.m. on Election Day to comply with state law. Under the order by Cobb County Superior Court Senior Judge Robert E. Flournoy III, the ballots will have to be received by 5 p.m. Nov. 8 but postmarked by Election Day.
The new deadline only applies to those 3,000 voters who are Cobb residents.
The American Civil Liberties Union and the Southern Poverty Law Center filed a lawsuit in Cobb County Superior Court asking the court to extend the deadline. Representatives for the Republican National Committee, Georgia Republican Party, the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Party of Georgia also intervened in the case.
Without the deadline extension, the ACLU argued, voters would be harmed.
“Voters risk not having their voices heard in this important election because counties have been set up to fail by Georgia’s anti-voter law,” said Andrea Young, executive director of the ACLU of Georgia.
Republicans for the state and national committee sought a stay on the order, which was denied.
Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC
Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC
Cobb Elections Director Tate Fall said in a statement that the county used a vendor to send out ballots through Oct. 25, but it was up to the county to process requests that came in after that. That’s when the county discovered its “equipment was not working,” she said.
“By the time we got the equipment online, the deadline for mailing the ballots had passed, prompting us to work with the U.S. Postal Service and UPS to take extraordinary measures,” Fall said. “Our team has been working around the clock to get the ballots out.”
The Postal Service is working to ensure ballots will be delivered on time for this year’s election, but it encouraged any mail-in voters to return their ballots by this past Tuesday, one week before Election Day. In an effort to help remedy the issue in Cobb, the ballots were sent out with prepaid express return envelopes.
Staff writer Caleb Groves contributed to this article.
