Long lines, polling site angst, missing ballots sully Georgia primary

It didn't take long for problems to become clear on this month's second big day of voting.

But the challenges seemed almost entirely in one place: Georgia, by far the biggest of the five states with primaries Tuesday, and a rising presidential battleground after emerging as a singular focus of voting rights advocates for two years.

Thousands, especially in and around Atlanta, faced hours-long lines from the time the polls opened — and then were confronted by frequently malfunctioning equipment and diminished teams of inexperienced poll workers. Many others who took the state's advice and sought to vote remotely said they'd never received a mail-in ballot.

The varied troubles with the coronavirus-delayed primary, being conducted after two postponements in the ninth largest state, were the latest foretaste of the myriad challenges facing a presidential election during a pandemic.

And that looks to be especially true in places like Georgia, where perceptions of institutionalized voter suppression have already depressed confidence that elections are both healthy and fair — and where this month's protests against excessive policing and racial injustice seem likely to generate a boost in registration and turnout.

The day is "turning out to be a self-inflicted mess," Nancy Abudu of the Southern Poverty Law Center said in the early afternoon. "This is no way to run a democracy in 2020. Georgia state leaders need to learn from today to ensure that for remaining elections this year, every eligible voter can easily cast a ballot and have that ballot counted."

State officials drastically reduced the number of in-person polling sites to minimize voters' and election officials' risk of Covid-19 infection, meaning some locations were expecting to see as many as 10,000 voters. Delays because of social distancing and disinfecting practices were sure to compound the delays.