Georgia's primary elections quickly descended into chaos, with voting-machine problems, a lack of paper ballots, and hours-long lines at polling places

• Voters in the metro Atlanta area faced immense difficulties casting a ballot in Georgia's primary election on Tuesday because of widespread problems with new electronic machines.
• Georgia's new voting machines didn't work in precincts across the state, and many polling locations didn't have enough paper provisional ballots for voters.
• Stephanie Jerez, who voted at Cross Keys High School in Atlanta, told Insider that she got to the polling place at 6:45 a.m. and wasn't able to vote for nearly four hours. She eventually cast a provisional ballot.

Voters throughout the metro Atlanta area faced immense difficulties voting in Georgia's primary election on Tuesday because of widespread problems with new electronic machines malfunctioning and shortages of paper ballots.

Local reporters and voters said that in many precincts in the counties in and around Atlanta, including Fulton, Gwinnett, DeKalb, and Cobb, undertrained poll workers ran into trouble getting the new voting machines to work, and polling stations didn't have enough paper ballots for every voter to cast a provisional ballot, leading to hours-long lines. Many people didn't get to vote at all.

Georgia had sent absentee-ballot requests to every active registered voter because of the COVID-19 pandemic, leading to record levels of mail-in voting. But the pandemic also meant shortages of poll workers and far fewer in-person polling places.

While Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said on Monday that long lines were expected, the system experienced a meltdown on Tuesday as machines were delivered to the wrong place and officials had trouble getting them to work.

In response to the meltdown in Fulton County's administration of in-person voting, a judge ruled on Tuesday evening that any voter in the county who is line to vote by 9 p.m. must be allowed to cast a ballot.

This year, Georgia debuted voting machines with ballot-marking devices, designed to create a paper trail as an extra layer of security to ensure the integrity of the results. After voters enter their selections on a touchscreen, the machine creates a paper ballot that's entered into a ballot scanner.

Ayele Ajavon, a spokeswoman for the advocacy group All Voting Is Local, told Insider that the group's volunteers in Georgia received reports of precincts where all the machines malfunctioned or poll workers weren't trained how to work them, of lines with over 100 people before polls even opened, and of some voters not being offered backup provisional ballots.

The secretary of state's office, which oversees the state's elections, and county-level officials pointed fingers at each other for the voting-machine problems reported in Fulton County and the surrounding area.

Gabriel Sterling, Georgia's statewide voting implementation manager, called the problems in the metro Atlanta area "unfortunate" but blamed equipment being delivered late and "poll workers not understanding setup or how to operate voting equipment." Raffensperger said his office would investigate the failures in the voting systems in Fulton and DeKalb counties.

While many of the problems originated at the county level and were to be expected because of the shortage of poll workers, some officials argued that the buck stopped with the secretary of state's office.

"It's astounding to me what an abdication of leadership that is, to push the ownership down to the counties," said Steve Bradshaw, a Democratic DeKalb County commissioner. "I was raised that if you mess up, fess up."

"The Secretary of State's job is to provide adequate support and training for counties as he implemented Georgia's new voting system, and he has failed," Maggie Chambers, a representative for Georgia's Democratic Party, said in a statement to Georgia Public Broadcasting. "Across the state, Georgia voters are waiting for hours to cast their ballots because Georgia's system is failing them."

Even before Election Day, there were warning signs that Georgia's election administration would lead to voters being disenfranchised.

The election office in Fulton County, which includes Atlanta and is the state's most populous county, was already investigating unknown numbers of absentee-ballot requests disappearing from its internal systems. Many voters in the county, including elected officials like state Sen. Jen Jordan, didn't get their ballots sent to them in time.

Jordan tweeted on Tuesday morning that several other voters in line with her had also requested ballots but never got them.

Georgia also held several days of early in-person voting to help reduce crowding, but shortages of poll workers and fewer open polling places meant that many people waited in line for hours at some polling places in the metro Atlanta region.

Stephanie Jerez, who voted at Cross Keys High School in Atlanta, told Insider that she got to her polling place at 6:45 a.m., 15 minutes before polls opened, and wasn't able to cast a ballot for almost four hours, until 11 a.m.

She said there were no updates from election officials for about an hour and a half before they announced that all the machines were down. About two hours after polls opened, officials started handing out paper provisional ballots — but they had only 20 on hand in the precinct, not nearly enough for the hundreds of voters in line.

Provisional ballots are not immediately counted on the day of the election. Election officials must verify the voter's registration information after the fact to process the ballot, meaning some voters risk not having theirs counted at all.

Jerez said the machine issues and the lack of provisional ballots meant that many people had to leave the line to go to work before they could vote.

"I submitted a provisional ballot, but I don't know if that'll even count," Jerez said, adding that she felt "very discouraged" by the experience.

The precinct manager at Cross Keys told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that his efforts to troubleshoot the machines didn't work and that he couldn't get through to county election officials for help.

The problems in Georgia echoed a cycle seen in last week's elections in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Washington, DC, where state officials made ambitious plans to massively scale up their use of absentee and mail-in ballots but had systemic problems with voters not getting their ballots and having to stand in hours-long lines during a pandemic to vote in person.

In all four elections, thousands of voters reported not receiving ballots at all, or receiving ballots for the wrong party or with incorrect instructions, then facing long lines at polling places that made it nearly impossible to practice social distancing.

Jerez said it was especially frustrating that so many people in Atlanta — and disproportionately in Black neighborhoods and communities of color — either did not get their ballots or were unable to vote after weeks of police-brutality protests and prominent leaders encouraging people to change the system by voting.

"I'm more frustrated that this is happening after all the protests over George Floyd and for the Black Lives Matter movement," she said. "Emotions are running high, and it's not helpful to be told to take action by voting if you're not going to be able to vote at all."

Many voting and civil-rights advocates said they were disappointed that so many precincts and counties saw chaos and breakdowns in their election administration given Georgia's very recent and highly publicized voter disenfranchisement and widespread election-administration problems in the 2018 midterm elections.

"These problems were avoidable, yet recurring problems in Georgia that are resulting in the potential disfranchisement of voters across the state," Kristen Clarke, the president and executive director of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under the Law, said in a Tuesday statement. "The state has had its share of voting challenges in the recent past and should have been better prepared for this moment."

Ellen Kurz, the president of the voting-rights organization iVote, said in a statement to Insider: "The state of Georgia, which has a well-documented history of voting problems, is literally robbing their residents of their right to vote. We need a full public accounting of what went wrong and how it will be fixed from Governor Kemp and Secretary Raffensperger."