Thousands of paper voter registration applications in Georgia still hadn’t been processed Friday, one week into early voting and nearly two weeks since the voter registration deadline.
New voters waiting for their registrations to be completed will have to cast provisional ballots or wait for their registrations to be verified. County election officials in metro Atlanta said they planned to work through the weekend and finish reviewing registration applications by Monday.
Much of the backlog was caused by a large number of paper registration forms submitted soon before the state’s Oct. 7 registration deadline.
Voter registration groups and individuals mailed paper forms to the secretary of state’s office, which then sorted them by county and distributed them to local election offices for review. Registrations submitted online or through driver’s license offices are processed more quickly, but some are still pending.
Voters who registered before the deadline will still be eligible to vote in the election after their registrations are verified by counties. They can also cast provisional ballots that will be counted if their registration information is later verified. There are currently 8.2 million registered voters in Georgia.
Credit: John Spink
Credit: John Spink
In DeKalb County, over 8,000 handwritten registration cards were pending Friday.
“We are actively working to process voter registrations to ensure all new voters and changes to voter registrations are updated in our systems,” said Erik Burton, a spokesman for DeKalb elections. “We have added additional resources to resolve the processing of paper voter registrations by Oct. 20.”
Election officials encouraged voters to continue checking the state’s My Voter Page at mvp.sos.ga.gov to find out whether they’re registered. Registration applications are valid as long as they were submitted or postmarked before the registration deadline.
An additional 4,500 registration applications were pending in Fulton County, and they should be processed by Monday, according to the county.
Gwinnett County officials received over 2,000 paper registrations Oct. 11 and Monday, and almost all of them were completed by Friday, Gwinnett Elections Supervisor Zach Manifold said.
“We always give voters registering at the deadline recommendations to give it seven to 10 days to process, so they might want to hold off on advance voting the first days to make sure their registration is complete,” Manifold said. “If they can’t wait, they can always cast a provisional ballot that would be counted after the election since their registration was processed during the eligible window.”
In some cases, election workers picked up registration forms from the secretary of state’s office rather than waiting for them to be mailed.
“There was no delay. We delivered applications to counties and allowed some counties to pick up registration forms all last week to ensure that applications received by the deadline were delivered ASAP,” said Mike Hassinger, a spokesman for the secretary of state’s office. “This was an ‘above and beyond’ effort that took a lot of extra staff time.”
Cobb County Election Director Tate Fall said the county has fewer than 1,000 pending registration applications remaining, and the backlog should be completed by Saturday.
Fair Fight, a voting rights group, said new voters who have problems should ask poll workers to contact their county’s main elections office to verify registrations.
“They can update your status in their system so you can vote without issue,” spokesman Max Flugrath said. “Make sure to vote early, so if there are any problems, you have time to fix them.”
In-person turnout set records for the first week of early voting in Georgia, with more than 1 million people voting from Tuesday through Friday.
By the time polls close on Election Day on Nov. 5, officials say total turnout could eclipse the state’s 5 million voters in 2020.
Are you registered to vote?
Georgia voters can check their voter registrations, polling places and sample ballots through the state’s My Voter Page at mvp.sos.ga.gov. Georgia’s registration deadline was Oct. 7, but some registration applications still haven’t been processed.
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