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‘I Refuse Not to Be Heard’: Georgia in Uproar Over Voting Meltdown

Long lines and malfunctioning voting machines marred statewide primary elections in Georgia, renewing attention on voting rights there.

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After several polling locations were closed, thousands of Georgia voters were sent to cast ballots at Park Tavern, a restaurant in Atlanta.CreditCredit...Audra Melton for The New York Times

[Update: Jon Ossoff holds strong lead as Georgia waits for primary results.]

ATLANTA — Georgia’s statewide primary elections on Tuesday were overwhelmed by a full-scale meltdown of new voting systems put in place after widespread claims of voter suppression during the state’s 2018 governor’s election.

Scores of new state-ordered voting machines were reported to be missing or malfunctioning, and hourslong lines materialized at polling places across Georgia.

Some people gave up and left before casting a ballot, and concerns spread that the problems would disenfranchise untold voters, particularly African-Americans. Predominantly black areas experienced some of the worst problems.

With Republican-leaning Georgia emerging as a possible battleground in this year’s presidential election and home to two competitive Senate races, the voting mess rattled Democratic officials and voters, with some blaming the state’s Republican governor and secretary of state for hastily instituting a new voting system without enough provisional ballots in case the voting machines did not function.

“It is a disaster that was preventable,” Stacey Abrams, the Democrat who narrowly lost the disputed 2018 governor’s race, said in an interview Tuesday afternoon. “It is emblematic of the deep systemic issues we have here in Georgia. One of the reasons we are so insistent upon better operations is that you can have good laws, but if you have incompetent management and malfeasance, voters get hurt, and that’s what we see happening in Georgia today.”

Security experts had warned that there was not nearly enough time to switch systems before the 2020 elections — especially amid the coronavirus pandemic, which ravaged the state and scared away hundreds of poll workers.

Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, blamed local officials in Fulton County, which includes most of the City of Atlanta, and said there were few issues elsewhere, while by midafternoon counties outside Atlanta had begun extending voting hours to account for time lost tending to the new machines.

Fulton County kept all of its polling sites open for two extra hours, until 9 p.m. Eastern. DeKalb County, just east of Fulton, kept seven precincts open late, one until 10:10 p.m. And Chatham County, which includes Savannah and is the state’s largest county outside greater Atlanta, kept 35 polling sites open until 9 p.m.

Ballot counting proceeded slowly on Tuesday night, with people still in line to vote in some places as the polls closed. No winners in major races had been called as of midnight.

“We have 159 counties and, by and large, 150 counties have really done a great job,” Mr. Raffensperger said. “We have one county that just stands out with glaring failures, and that’s Fulton County, and unfortunately that’s our largest county.”

Rick Barron, the Fulton County elections director, said the problems were “mostly equipment issues, many caused by different training challenges that we had.” He said Mr. Raffensberger “can’t wash his hands of responsibility,” but added that trying to simultaneously conduct an in-person election and a mail-voting one had stretched the county’s resources.

The difficulties renewed public attention on voting rights in a state where black citizens have long accused the white Republicans who control the state’s government and elections of racially discriminatory voter suppression.

While the worst problems were reported in greater Atlanta, no corner of the state had a fully functional voting experience, officials said. Nikema Williams, a state senator and the chairwoman of the Georgia Democratic Party, said that by 7:10 a.m., she had 84 text messages reporting polling sites that didn’t open, machines that didn’t arrive and lines that stretched for blocks.

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Listen to ‘The Daily’: Georgia’s Election Meltdown

Why the state’s troubled primary elections this week may be a preview of graver battles coming in the general election.
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transcript

Listen to ‘The Daily’: Georgia’s Election Meltdown

Hosted by Michael Barbaro and Caitlin Dickerson; produced by Eric Krupke, Alexandra Leigh Young, Robert Jimison and Stella Tan; with help from Sydney Harper; and edited by M.J. Davis Lin

Why the state’s troubled primary elections this week may be a preview of graver battles coming in the general election.

caitlin dickerson

From The New York Times, I’m Caitlin Dickerson. This is “The Daily.”

[music]

Today: A full-scale meltdown of new voting systems in Georgia is alarming Democratic leaders ahead of the state’s general election in November. My colleague, Astead Herndon, on why voting access in Georgia has become a national issue for the party. It’s Thursday, June 11.

OK, Astead, so tell me what happened on Tuesday in Georgia.

astead herndon

Tuesday was Georgia’s primary elections, where they were slated to send Senate candidates and House candidates ahead to November’s general election, but —

archived recording

After twice being delayed due to the coronavirus pandemic, finally primary election day, and some of the polls, simply did not go as planned.

astead herndon

What we saw on Tuesday did not look much like an election at all.

archived recording

Our newsroom is flooded with emails, calls, tweets, texts of voters reporting issues and irregularities at precincts across the metro.

astead herndon

At the beginning of the day, polling sites were not opening on time, and then it became very clear that they weren’t adequately staffed.

archived recording

Health concerns kept many longtime poll workers from showing up today, leaving inexperienced volunteers to run new voting machines for the first time.

astead herndon

Also, there were problems with the machines that were at the polling sites.

archived recording 1

Poll workers said they had difficulties turning on the voter check-in computers, and encoding voter access cards, and installing touch screens.

archived recording 2

They had printer problems, missing some electrical plugs, as well.

astead herndon

There are also fewer polling places to begin with because of the coronavirus pandemic, so the virus has added more emphasis on mail-in ballots and absentee ballots, many of which some Georgia residents said they did not receive in the mail. And this created massive lines —

archived recording

We saw repeated over and over people standing, sitting, waiting for the opportunity to have their say in our state’s political future.

astead herndon

— causing people to wait more than four or five hours in some cases.

archived recording 1

53 years I’ve been voting, and never have seen a line like this in 53 years.

archived recording 2

This is wrong. This is America. This is a crisis in our world to make us not exercise our right to vote.

astead herndon

It also caused some people to turn away, just throwing up their hands and saying, you know, they can’t spend a whole day waiting for a line that they don’t know is going to move.

archived recording

The system is a joke, and we’re not laughing.

caitlin dickerson

So why was this happening, Astead? What’s the reason for all this chaos?

astead herndon

Tuesday was a confluence of local and state problems. And what you hear from the counties that were particularly affected was that certainly, their machines and their processes did not work, and they take some blame for that. But what Democrats say is a larger problem is a state and Republican administration system that runs the elections process that is not interested in helping these counties succeed.

caitlin dickerson

What I hear you saying is that what happened on Tuesday was not simply a fluke.

astead herndon

Right. The roots of Georgia’s fights over ballot access and voting rights start way before Tuesday.

archived recording

David, what has been the reaction there in Washington to the Supreme Court effectively hobbling the Voting Rights Act?

astead herndon

In 2013, the Supreme Court opened the door for states to have more autonomy in changing their voting procedures without input from the federal government.

archived recording (david leonhardt)

You see Democrats very upset about this rule, And you see Republicans who have come out so far praising it, saying the Voting Rights Act has done its work. It may not be needed anymore.

astead herndon

And that allowed states like Georgia, states that had historically been closely watched in the South, to really overhaul their ballot process. This has included closing polling locations across the state that have predominantly been in Democratic and African-American communities. And also, they passed in 2017 what’s called the Exact Match Law, which means when someone registers for the ballot, if there is any difference between that registration and the identification the state has on file — whether that is a misplaced letter or an incorrect hyphen — it allows the state to throw out that ballot registration. That has led to thousands of people being purged from Georgia’s voting rolls. And both of these things, closing the polling locations and the Exact Match Law, have disproportionately impacted minority communities, and black communities especially. I remember in 2018 —

archived recording

In Georgia, a record-breaking two million early votes were cast, and all eyes are focused on the state’s race for governor.

astead herndon

— being in Georgia for the closely-watched governor’s race between Stacey Abrams and Brian Kemp.

archived recording

A poll released today shows that Georgia’s secretary of state and Republican candidate Brian Kemp leads the Democratic candidate, Stacey Abrams, by just one point.

astead herndon

And you would be at people’s homes, and you would watch them look up whether their voting registration was still on file. And many would be shocked to find out that they had been purged even without their knowledge. And this came in the middle of a governor’s race that was just as much about voting rights as it was about Democrat versus Republican.

archived recording (stacey abrams)

I’m Stacey Abrams, and I’m running for governor, because where you come from shouldn’t determine how far you can go.

astead herndon

Stacey Abrams, who had previously been the House Minority Leader in Georgia, had built a career off of registering new voters, bringing people — new people into the process, and kind of a vision of a blue Georgia on the backs of a multiracial coalition that had yet to be achieved.

archived recording (stacey abrams)

The blue wave is African-American. [CHEERING]

It’s white. It’s Latino. It’s Asian Pacific Islander.

archived recording (crowd)

Yes!

archived recording (stacey abrams)

It is made up of those who’ve been told that they are not worthy of being here.

archived recording (crowd)

Yes!

archived recording (stacey abrams)

It is comprised of those who are documented and undocumented.

archived recording (crowd)

Yes!

astead herndon

And she was facing the secretary of state, Brian Kemp —

archived recording (brian kemp)

Well, thankfully, the truth here is very simple. Georgians should simply watch what she says. You’ll know that she’s talking about this election, and talking about illegals voting for her in this election. They filed a lawsuit.

astead herndon

— who had refused to recuse himself from overseeing the state’s election, even as he ran. And this race was wrapped up in accusations of voter suppression.

archived recording (stacey abrams)

My worry is that he’s using his position as secretary of state to tilt the playing field in his direction.

astead herndon

And from Republicans about voter fraud.

archived recording (brian kemp)

I think hardworking Georgians should decide who their governor is, not people here illegally like my opponent wants.

astead herndon

There was a real sense that whoever won this would be determining the direction, and most importantly, would be the referee for the state’s elections going forward.

And on election day —

archived recording 1

Good morning. There is no lull in this line, and you can see people lined up here.

archived recording 2

The worst of the issues was in Fulton County. At the Pittman Park location, only three voting machines were sent, but eight were supposed to be there.

archived recording 3

I live in East Point, and I updated my address at least two times before election day. And on Tuesday when I went to my polling place, they denied me a ballot.

astead herndon

Stacey Abrams lost by a little less than 55,000 votes. And when she lost, accused Republicans of voter suppression tactics that changed the outcome of the race.

archived recording (stacey abrams)

Democracy only works when we work for it, and apparently today, when we stand in line for hours to meet it at the ballot box, that’s when democracy works.

astead herndon

For a while, Abrams wouldn’t concede to Kemp.

archived recording (stacey abrams)

Friends, friends, we are still on the verge of history, and the best is yet to come. [CHEERING]

caitlin dickerson

Astead, how do Republicans respond to these allegations from Democrats that the prior election was unfair?

astead herndon

On the defensive side, Republicans say that there is not evidence that they are proactively trying to suppress votes. They flip the blame, saying that it is local Democratic officials in these areas who have not lived up to their task in administrating clean elections. They also say that they are focused on things like voter fraud, which we should note does not have real evidence. And they justify things like exact match as a tool to combat this voter fraud. But they’ve also done offensive moves. The state purchased new voting machines after criticism that the previous ones were not safe, and a court ordered to do so, and those were used for the first time in Tuesday’s election.

caitlin dickerson

And based on what you saw Tuesday, those measures to address problems in the electoral system, they don’t seem to have worked.

astead herndon

Certainly, those measures do not meet the scope of the crisis. So for whatever new voting machines, or for whatever back and forth this happening between county and state officials, what is clear is that voting in Georgia does not go the way voting should be. But for Republicans, they’ll say that the vast majority of Georgia’s county’s, 150 out of 159, had fine days on Tuesday. But it’s important to recognize that those nine counties that had the biggest issues on Tuesday, they’re not only Democratic areas, but those are the counties that have the largest minority populations in the state.

caitlin dickerson

So from everything you’ve said, it sounds like Democrats would see the problems with Tuesday’s election as being just a continuation of voting issues that have plagued these same communities in the past, and that they feel Republicans have either ignored or even made worse.

astead herndon

That’s what Democrats will tell you. I remember running into the state Democratic chair when she was trying to vote. It took her five hours on what was her 10-year wedding anniversary. And she was talking about how familiar it felt, and encouraging people in the line to hold that feeling with them as they look towards the general election. But when you look at the reaction across the country and how much interest there was in what was happening in Georgia, I think a part of that is because the national Democratic and Republican parties realize just how important this state is — not just for November, but what could be a preview of how Southern politics is changing in the future.

[music]

caitlin dickerson

We’ll be right back.

Astead, what do you mean? Why is Georgia such a key state for the Democratic party?

astead herndon

For decades now, Democrats have been virtually shut out of the South. It has been almost impossible for the party to find consistent success in getting a candidate elected to statewide office, whether that’s a governor or the Senate, and in presidential elections. And what Democrats have been trying to do over the past decade is create a grassroots momentum that can change the way that they operate in the South. And Georgia has been the focal point of that.

caitlin dickerson

Astead, help me understand the Democrats’ strategy in Georgia.

astead herndon

It basically breaks down to three areas.

The first is just the changing demographics of the state. New industries, particularly movie and film, have caused an influx of a new Southerner, as some folks called it, who is living in places like Atlanta and the metro areas, that has made the South their home in the way that has given Democrats a new type of voter to target. Another key point of the strategy is in registering Georgians who may not have participated in previous elections. So that includes predominately young people and people of color, and going to those communities that have kind of felt distant from the political process and bringing them along and involved. The third piece, which has been accelerated in the last three years, has been trying to persuade a white, often college-educated voter, who probably had voted Republican before, that Democrats are now more acceptable party. And this is something that Democrats have said Donald Trump is their best recruiter for. That there’s a type of upscale Southerner who doesn’t like the incivility that they feel coming from the White House, and is just not as much of a hardened Republican as maybe some others. This is where Democrats, combining all of those three, think they can make big inroads.

caitlin dickerson

So it sounds like Democrats see Georgia as ripe for flipping from red to blue because of these shifts you’re talking about.

astead herndon

Yes. They see it as their most likely opportunity to deliver a blue state in the South for Joe Biden in November, and in the U.S. Senate. But they also see it as a gateway to a playbook that other Southern states can replicate. The thought process is, if Georgia can put it together after years and years of coming close, that allows places like South Carolina, places like Texas, to have a real roadmap on how Democrats can make inroads. What they’re missing is a victory to prove to other states and to prove to the Democratic party that the South is worth investing in.

caitlin dickerson

And how likely is it that this victory you’re describing is actually going to happen?

astead herndon

While it’s certainly a possibility, you have to note that Georgia has been kind of fool’s gold for Democrats for some years now, which makes the kind of conundrum for what the national party and Joe Biden’s campaign should do this year. Should they invest in Georgia, which is the only state in the country that has both its Senate seats up in November? Or, do they spend that money, that time, that investment in states that they know are more likely to be the tipping point for the electoral college? It’s kind of a choice between playing it safe or putting all their chips on the table.

caitlin dickerson

So in light of what they saw on Tuesday, which of these two strategies do you think the Democratic leadership is leaning toward right now?

astead herndon

In the short term, what Biden chooses to prioritize for the November election, we don’t really know. But one of the best ways that the campaign can signal its intentions is through the vice presidential selection. If Joe Biden was to select someone who represents the kind of new Southern democrat — someone like Stacey Abrams or Keisha Lance Bottoms, or even Val Demings, the representative in Florida — that could signal that the campaign is trying to unlock this type of new Democratic future in the region that we’ve talked about. And I don’t think that you can separate race from this question also. The South and Southern Democrats are overwhelmingly black, and those are the same people that helped revive Joe Biden’s campaign after he was struggling in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada. To me, an important question as we look towards November is, will Joe Biden try to reward those communities with an increased focus on them as he moves towards the general election, or is the primary over and this is all about just the ways that the campaign believes it needs to beat Donald Trump?

caitlin dickerson

So we’ve been talking about how important Georgia is to the Democratic party in 2020, but I can imagine that for that same reason, Georgia is equally as important to Republicans. So what are they doing to hold on to the state?

astead herndon

I think like Democrats, Georgia Republicans have short-term and long-term considerations. In the short term, they just think the state remains kind of structurally red. But in the long term, Republicans will concede that the demographics of the state are not moving in their direction. And what they need to do to stop this kind of rising tide is to appeal to kind of new communities there. And there’s kind of a pitch that, we should tell them that the reason you’re leaving California, or New York, or other places is because those states have high taxes and Georgia’s business friendly. The “why” liberals have wanted to come here is because of the kind of conservative values, and that’s what we should try to hold on to. The problem is, when the President has so defined the parties by kind of social and cultural concerns, can the state Republican make a pitch to an immigrant community, a black professional, around Republicanism with that not being tied in to what Trump has made the focus of the party?

caitlin dickerson

You’re talking about this cultural clash going on in the country, and that’s very top of mind for a lot of Americans right now, obviously. So can you put this election we’re talking about into the context of this broader cultural moment that we are all living right now?

astead herndon

Mm-hmm. For both Democrats and Republicans, I think that this moment, this re-emergence of race and racial justice as the country’s top even electoral or voting concern, plays into the strategies that we have laid out. For the Republican side, when we talk about the way that state Republicans and the President have tried to appeal to voters, you’ve seen Republicans in the last week or so try to make “defund the police” a scare tactic to bring back that suburban voter. You’ve seen them try to focus on the more destructive or looting aspects of the protests to discredit the movement as a whole. But frankly, public opinion shows that there has been widespread agreement around police brutality as a growing issue, and I think that’s important to note about what candidates for both sides are saying right now in Georgia. Doug Collins, the representative on the Republican side who is running for Senate, he was the member who wrote and helped pass the First Step Act, the criminal justice reform that President Trump signed into law. And this is a deeply conservative representative who has made that criminal justice pitch a part of his appeal, even in minority communities. And on the Democratic side, the Senate candidates are running very explicit campaigns about race and criminal justice, and about inequalities that were kind of unfathomable in the South years ago. They say that the times are changing, that you don’t have to be cagey or calibrate to the ideological middle on things like race. That white Democrats are willing and open to talking about things in explicit terms, and they think that that can be a winning strategy.

caitlin dickerson

Astead, you’ve been describing how important Georgia could be in the 2020 elections. So what does what happened on Tuesday night tell us about what we might expect?

astead herndon

I think Tuesday is a signal for both the country and the parties of things that we might have to expect come November. For one, if elected officials do not proactively prepare for an election that could be upended by virus concerns, we might have lines like we saw on Tuesday. If they’re not prepared to count as thousands and thousands of absentee and mail-in ballots in ways that are unprecedented in presidential history, we might not get results from key states on election night. And even more so, about the type of messages that politicians are giving to the public right now, if people don’t feel as if going to the ballot box and voting is a process that is equitable and fair to them, it is going to be harder for particularly Democratic politicians to tell their base, this is where you should put your energy. This is how you make change. What we saw on Tuesday was not an encouraging scene.

caitlin dickerson

Thank you so much, Astead.

astead herndon

Thank you, Caitlin.

caitlin dickerson

We’ll be right back.

Here’s what else you need to know today.

archived recording (philonise floyd)

The man who took his life, who suffocated him for 8 minutes and 46 seconds, he still called him “sir” as he begged for his life. I can’t tell you the kind of pain you feel when you watch something like that.

caitlin dickerson

On Wednesday, George Floyd’s brother, Philonise Floyd, testified before Congress.

archived recording (philonise floyd)

George wasn’t hurting anyone that day. He didn’t deserve to die over $20. I’m asking you, is that what a black man is worth, $20? This is 2020. Enough is enough.

caitlin dickerson

Speaking to the House Judiciary Committee, Floyd called on lawmakers to pass reforms that would address police brutality and racial discrimination.

archived recording (philonise floyd)

If his death ends up changing the world for the better — and I think it will — then he died as he lived. It is on you to make sure his death is not in vain.

caitlin dickerson

House Democrats are expected to pass a reform bill this month that would make it easier to track, prosecute and punish police misconduct. But Senate Republicans have announced plans to draft their own reform bill.

That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m Caitlin Dickerson. See you tomorrow.

“It’s a hot mess,” she said. “Our secretary of state has not adequately prepared us for today. We knew today was coming. If you show up and there’s not a machine, that’s a problem.”

In Atlanta’s Old Fourth Ward — the neighborhood where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. grew up — Marneia Mitchell arrived at her polling place five minutes before polls were to open at 7 a.m. She thought it was early enough to vote fast, avoid trouble and get on with her day.

Three hours later, she was still waiting in line, having moved about 60 feet from where she had started. At first voters were told that the machines were not functioning, and then that poll workers did not have the passwords necessary to operate them.

The line stretched three long city blocks and comprised hundreds of voters — a multicultural crowd in one of the city’s most cosmopolitan boroughs, many masked, some in lawn chairs, everyone sweating as the temperature pushed toward 90 degrees.

Ms. Mitchell, 50, a stationery designer who is African-American, was livid. “It’s disgusting,” she said. “It’s despicable.”

Around the corner, Terri Russell, 57, a retired worker for the Fulton County tax system, had also been waiting for three hours. She leaned on a beach chair that a do-gooder had offered her.

Ms. Russell, who wore a mask, said that she had bronchitis and asthma, and that she rarely left the house even when there was no pandemic. She said she had requested an absentee ballot but never received one. “I refuse not to be heard and so I am standing in line,” she said.

Image
A poll worker allowed people in to vote at Central Park Recreation Center in Atlanta on Tuesday.Credit...Audra Melton for The New York Times

Just south of Atlanta’s airport, in Clayton County, the predominantly black precinct at the Christian Fellowship Baptist Church had run out of Democratic primary provisional ballots by 10 a.m., according to Fair Fight Action, the voting rights organization founded by Ms. Abrams.

An uncontested Republican stronghold since the Clinton administration, Georgia is now a presidential battleground state for the first time in a generation, drawing renewed scrutiny to the state’s cumbersome and long-suppressive voting systems. Along with the contest between President Trump and former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., Georgians will cast ballots this November in two competitive Senate races, the results of which could help tip the balance of the chamber.

The voting problems Georgia experienced on Tuesday were hardly a surprise. Residents reported requesting absentee ballots and waiting months for them to arrive — and some never came at all. Ms. Abrams said her absentee ballot had arrived with a sealed return envelope, and she was unable to mail it back. Ms. Williams waited five hours at an early-voting site after her absentee ballot never arrived in the mail.

David Dreyer, a Democratic state representative, said he learned Saturday that Fulton County was short 250 poll workers. Many of the usual poll workers are older and were afraid to work because of the coronavirus.

A training session for poll workers held Monday, Mr. Dreyer said, consisted of a one-hour training video provided by the secretary of state on how to use the voting machines — but “you needed an I.T. professional to figure it out.”

Georgia’s voting fiasco stemmed primarily from the 30,000 new voting machines the state bought last year for $107 million from Dominion Voting Systems, which is based in Denver.

Tuesday’s primaries were the first time the machines had been used statewide, though six rural, predominantly white counties used them for municipal contests in December — and experienced problems with voting and significant delays.

Mr. Raffensperger’s office at first defended the new machines on Tuesday and said they hadn’t malfunctioned, with an aide blaming local officials and inexperienced poll workers for the problems.

In an interview, Mr. Raffensperger accepted no blame for the hourslong waits or voting machine problems in Atlanta or elsewhere in the state.

Jurisdictions that ran out of provisional ballots, he said, should have ordered more of them before the polls opened. County elections officials should have found more younger poll workers to replace more experienced ones who bowed out because of the pandemic, he said. No element of the elections meltdown, Mr. Raffensperger said, was his fault.

“The counties run their elections,” he said. “The problems in Fulton County are the problems with their management team, not with me.”

Kristen Clarke, the president of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said that a disproportionate number of complaints by Georgians to the election protection hotline run by the committee and other advocacy groups had come from African-Americans. “We’re getting overwhelmed by the volume of calls from Georgia,” she said.

The machines bought by the state last year were instantly controversial. Security experts said they were insecure. Privacy experts worried that the screens could be seen from nearly 30 feet away. Budget hawks balked at the price tag.

And one of Dominion Voting Systems’ lobbyists, Jared Samuel Thomas, has deep connections to Gov. Brian Kemp, the Republican who defeated Ms. Abrams in 2018. Mr. Thomas served as Mr. Kemp’s campaign manager in his 2002 State Senate race, and as chief of staff to Mr. Kemp when he was secretary of state.

Mr. Thomas did not respond to messages on Tuesday, but Kay Stimson, a Dominion vice president, said the company had received just 50 “calls for election support” from Georgia by 3 p.m. “It’s a relatively low number given the scale,” she said.

Mr. Raffensperger spent more than $400,000 in federal election assistance funding in March to air a television commercial promoting the new machines as “protecting ballot integrity and making sure every ballot is counted.”

FreedomWorks, a conservative nonprofit backed by the billionaire Charles Koch, and the National Election Defense Coalition, a nonpartisan group focused on election security, warned Georgia against buying the machines in February 2019. In a letter sent to the State Senate’s Ethics Committee, the groups cited several concerns, including that the machines were difficult to set up before elections.

Image
Tuesday’s primaries were the first time that 30,000 new voting machines had been used statewide.Credit...Brynn Anderson/Associated Press

Election security advocates had urged the state to instead choose hand-marked paper ballots, which they argue are more secure and cost effective.

The A.C.L.U. of Georgia had warned in January — well before the coronavirus emerged as a concern for voters — that the state was ill-prepared for this year’s elections.

“They were issuing brand-new machines on a massive scale and that’s never been done before,” said Andrea Young, the executive director. “You need to put in more resources, more training for poll workers, for citizens.”

Ms. Young, who called the elections a “massive failure,” said that whether the voting difficulties were because of an intentional effort to suppress voting or incompetence, the end result was the same. “This is not acceptable in a democracy,” she said. “You can’t do democracy on the cheap.”

Marilyn Marks, a voting rights advocate with the Coalition for Good Governance, described a total breakdown of the new voting system when she went to a polling place in Atlanta around 10:30 a.m. All three elements — the electronic poll books that allow voters to check in, the touch-screen ballot-selection machines, and the ballot scanners — had broken down.

Ms. Marks said the attempt to switch systems during a presidential election year was doomed to be riddled with major glitches. “That would be like Walmart deciding that they wanted to change out their point-of-sale system on Black Friday,” she said.

At a news conference on Tuesday night, Ms. Abrams said, “The best intentions met the worst preparations, and we found ourselves in the midst of both incompetence and malfeasance.”

“No state should look like Georgia did today,” she added.

Richard Fausset reported from Atlanta, Reid J. Epstein from Washington, and Rick Rojas from Columbus, Miss. Nick Corasaniti contributed reporting from Ocean View, Del., Stephanie Saul from New York, and Michael Wines from Washington.

Richard Fausset is a correspondent based in Atlanta. He mainly writes about the American South, focusing on politics, culture, race, poverty and criminal justice. He previously worked at the Los Angeles Times, including as a foreign correspondent in Mexico City. More about Richard Fausset

Reid J. Epstein covers campaigns and elections from Washington. Before joining The Times in 2019, he worked at The Wall Street Journal, Politico, Newsday and The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. More about Reid J. Epstein

Rick Rojas is a national correspondent covering the American South. He has been a staff reporter for The Times since 2014. More about Rick Rojas

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Anger and Mistrust in Georgia As Vote Dissolves Into Debacle. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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