FAIRBURN, GA — Republicans spent three weeks doing a victory lap about new state voting laws as Georgians broke records during early voting. But the honeymoon ended in Fulton County on Election Day.
A board of elections meeting devolved into a back-and-forth between board members and a raucous room of voters who had been turned away from their polling places.
“You’re suppressing our vote!” Diane Schindler yelled to the board from beyond the podium, the would-be voters shouting assent.
What began with an extended defense quickly descended into the voting version of the OK Corral. Attendees stood, stalked and yelled at board members and other attendees.
According to board Vice Chair Aaron Johnson, the problem came from Georgia’s new array of voting laws that placed restrictions on voter registrations, including specific requirements about voter residency. Multiple voters were challenged due to a mix-up of residential and business addresses, an issue that had not prevented them from voting in 2022 or 2020.
One of the challenged voters stood up to shout that she had been told her home did not exist despite living in said home.
Another pleaded to know how she and her daughter were supposed to have a residential address when they were homeless. The fury always landed back on the seemingly helpless board.
“Before this year, we didn’t have this problem,” Johnson said after a particularly testy exchange with DJ Burel, who had finally reached the podium. Burel, a DOJ contractor, demanded to know, on the record, why the board was being complicit in the challenges.
Eventually, after another interruption, Johnson ran out of patience: “Let me finish,” he said to Burel.
Tuesday’s meeting was apparently without precedent for the board members. At one point, Johnson said that he had only seen six voters challenged as a member. Over 20 sat in front of him.
As the board conducted its official business, the crowd tried to piece together what was happening among themselves. They concluded none of the challenged voters had received a notice that their registration had been challenged. Most found that their registration still showed them as active voters.
They quickly shouted each finding to the deliberative board.
“What if I didn’t get a letter?” called a man in the back, echoed by others.
At one point, one man stood up to leave.
“Don’t leave yet!” Johnson said.
“I got to … I can’t vote!” the man yelled, triggering a woman to ask him, “Why you giving up?” The man sat back down.
But Johnson’s attempts to placate frequently fell by the wayside.
“I understand your frustration, but I promise you, the people sitting here in front of you are trying to help you vote,” Johnson said.
“Not all of y’all,” Ms. Baker, the woman being challenged, shot back.
Touches of levity colored chaos, of the “I’ll cry if I don’t laugh” variety, like when attendees added their voices to the “nays” of a sustained voter challenge.
Finally, two hours into a meeting where red tape timelines continually forced them to sustain voter challenges, one board member was over it. She asked if it would be breaking the law for the board to deny a challenge and allow a woman named Rich Nanni to vote.
The board deliberated. Then they voted, and now Nanni will too.
The bureaucratic mess made one thing clear. Fulton County is again the epicenter of election tension in Georgia.
“These motherfuckers are full of shit, and they know it,” Burel told NOTUS. “That’s the truth at the end of the day.”
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Ben T.N. Mause is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.