Just months after Georgia’s Secretary of State announced that the state’s voter registration management system would be changed, one county is reporting issues as early voting for the May 24 primary elections begins.
“Unfortunately, the 2022 Primary Advance Voting began with multiple issues at polling locations throughout Cobb County,” the Cobb County Republican Party said in a May 5 statement. “Since the polls opened on Monday, May 2, 2022, problems have included poll pad voter data being missing and incorrect information on certain ballots; some ballots excluded a State Representative race and some ballots excluded the Cityhood referendums. Since our vote is anonymous, once a ballot is cast there is no way to rectify an issue.”
“Today we were faced with the same issues being reported; in addition the early voting check-in system (ENet), crashed,” the group said. “The MyVoterPage contains inaccurate or missing information for some voters. The problems do not appear to be isolated; however, we have not yet determined the number of affected voters or the number of incorrect ballots.”
Noting that “this chaos cannot continue,” the county party called the state and county officials to get a grip on the situation.
“As the representative of the Cobb Republican Party, we are elevating our level of concern,” the statement said. “The Cobb Board of Elections has suggested an election challenge (after the election) as a possible remedy, but we believe that the office of the Secretary of State and the Cobb Board of Elections exist to prevent these matters from having to appeal to the courts for every minor problem – but the minor problems may be indicative of a systemic failure.”
Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger announced the change in voter registration management in January.
The new system is built atop the data servicing and customer relationship management software platform Salesforce.
Salesforce is a far-left Silicon Valley titan, and its CEO Marc Benihoff is known as one of the most “woke” leaders in the tech industry.
When the change was announced, Raffensperger assured Georgians that the change was for the better.
“This new system is more advanced, more secure, and more user-friendly and will give our election directors and my office new tools to better manage our election efforts,” he said at the time.
Raffensperger’s office did not return a Monday comment request.
The Secretary of State has been under fire ever since the 2020 election cycle, when claims of voter fraud in Georgia abounded. He faced heat from former President Donald J. Trump, for what Trump felt was a failure to investigate the results of the election.
Trump lost the state by a slim margin – just fewer than 12,000 total votes.
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Pete D’Abrosca is a reporter at The Georgia Star News and The Star News Network. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “Election Day 2020” by Phil Roeder. CC BY 2.0.
