The line stretched around the block at South Cobb Regional Library in Mableton where voters waited in line for hours to cast ballots on the first day of early voting in the Nov. 3 general election on Oct. 12, 2020. (Photo by Beau Evans)
Early voting in the momentous 2020 general elections started off with a bang Monday as thousands of Georgians poured into precincts, eager to cast perhaps the most important ballots of their lives.
More than 128,000 people piled into polling places across the state to kick off the three-week stretch of early voting, according to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office.
It was a record number of first-day ballot casters who turned out amid the lingering health terror of coronavirus and unprecedented nationwide doubt in the legitimacy of voting processes in the United States.
“It’s a very important election,” said Theressa Odums, a longtime Cobb County voter. “So I wanted to make sure I was here to vote.”
Seated in a fold-out chair beneath an umbrella in the hot sun, Odums was one of many voters who spent their entire day waiting in line to vote at the South Cobb Regional Library in Mableton.
They were among the thousands of people who queued up from morning to dusk at precincts throughout the state, forming lines that stretched around entire street blocks, particularly in urban areas like metro Atlanta and Savannah.
The line outside South Cobb Regional Library in Mableton stretched around the block on the first day of early voting for the Nov. 3 elections on Oct. 12, 2020. (Photo by Beau Evans)
Bernadine Conner, who stood in line with Odums from 9 a.m. until well past 4 p.m., said she wanted ample breathing room to cast her ballot before Election Day on Nov. 3 when lines outside polling places could very well stretch far longer.
“I’m just being patient and having the fortitude to stick it out,” Conner said. “That’s what it takes.”
Voter turnout in Georgia is expected to top 5 million next month with a presidential contest, double the usual number of U.S. Senate seats and a fierce push by Democrats to flip the balance of power in the Georgia House of Representatives for the first time in 16 years.
Looming over all is the highly contagious, vaccine-less respiratory virus that has splintered social interactions and local economies, coupled with the most decisive test yet for Georgia’s new paper-and-scanner voting machines that drew intense scrutiny even before the global pandemic struck.
Janine Eveler, the elections director for Cobb County, said her nine early-voting precincts saw no technical issues with voting on Monday save for a few minor hiccups that were quickly mended.
Contributing more to the hours-long lines, Eveler said, were revised processes to check in early voters via certifications and signature oaths, which took longer than normal in order to abide by social-distancing practices.
On top of that, droves of voters had requested absentee ballots prior to arriving in-person at polling places Monday, representing a fraction of the roughly 1.6 million Georgians seeking to vote by mail amid the pandemic.
Every voter who requests a mail-in ballot but shows up in-person must formally cancel their ballot by signing an affidavit, which adds more time to the already long waits at precincts, Eveler said.
Despite the relatively smooth sailing at her precincts, Eveler said late Monday that in her more-than two decades as Cobb’s election chief, she had never seen such a busy first day of early voting.
“The first day is always heavier because there’s pent-up excitement,” Eveler said. “But this has been a perfect storm.”
Uncommonly long lines have been anticipated for months now, following the shocking wait times that confronted Georgia voters during the primary elections on June 9 during the height of the COVID-19 outbreak.
To prepare, Raffensperger’s office has pushed to recruit more poll workers, doled out grant funds for absentee drop boxes, invested in new technology to broadcast line waits in real time and let voters apply for mail-in ballots online, and mustered more on-site technical assistance to help local poll workers rapidly solve potential equipment issues.
But the true test will come on Nov. 3 when millions of voters head to the polls across the state, election officials hunker down to count mounds of mail-in ballots and Georgians conclude what is shaping up to be one of the most impactful elections in decades.
Take it from Scott Traslavina, a Cobb County voter who ditched a day of work as an appliance repairman to stand in line to vote at the Mableton library.
Departing the voting booth after hours of waiting, Traslavina said he felt anxious to have missed so much work with times as tough as they are now. But even more so, he said he felt great relief knowing that his vote for the state and country’s future leaders will count.
“I didn’t trust that my vote would be counted with mail-in because I thought current administrations here in the state and country might impede that,” Traslavina said. “But now I know it’s done.”
Early voting continues in Georgia through Oct. 30.
Andrew Clyde (left) and Devin Pandy (right ) are competing for the 9th Congressional District seat in the 2020 general election. (Photos by candidate campaigns).
Andrew Clyde, a gun store owner and the Republican nominee in Georgia’s 9th Congressional District, fielded attacks on his business dealings and a recent lawsuit against Athens-Clarke County during a debate Monday ahead of the Nov. 3 general election.
His Democratic opponent, actor and U.S. Army veteran Devin Pandy, jabbed Clyde for costing Athens taxpayers “tens of thousands of dollars” amid the cash-strapped days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Pandy also called Clyde “another millionaire attempting to buy an election.”
But Clyde took the criticism in stride during the debate hosted by the Atlanta Press Club. His reluctance to punch back at Pandy likely stemmed from the position he holds as the Republican nominee in a heavily conservative district covering northeastern Georgia from Gainesville to Athens.
The June 9 primary election tells the tale: More than 140,000 Republican voters turned out for that election, while Democrats only cast around 31,000 ballots.
A U.S. Navy veteran, Clyde absorbed similarly fierce blows from his Republican opponent in the Aug. 11 primary runoff, state Rep. Matt Gurtler, R-Tiger, before winning by a comfortable margin.
On Monday, the two general-election candidates squaring off ahead of next month’s contest stuck with party lines on bread-and-butter issues, forcing Pandy to go on the offensive to distinguish himself in the Democrat-averse district.
Pandy slammed Clyde for suing Athens-Clarke officials to keep his business open during the county’s shelter-in-place order in March, drawing parallels between that case and contracts Clyde held with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) after he sued the federal agency for asset forfeiture and pushed legislation to reform the practice.
“Andrew Clyde only wants to be involved in government when it impacts his own bottom line,” Pandy said during Monday’s debate.
Ignoring those attacks, Clyde embraced his past battles with the IRS as a pillar of his conservative personality and limited-government political beliefs.
“This experience showed me there’s a very thin line between we the people running our government and our government running us,” Clyde said. “And I believe that we the people need to run our government.”
Pandy also had sharp criticism for Clyde on the issue of climate change, which the Republican nominee on Monday said he does not think exists beyond the normal four-season cycle each year. Claiming that scientists have “changed their tune on climate change,” Clyde argued “there are scientists who believe it and many who don’t.”
“I will hold court with those scientists who don’t believe in man-made climate change,” Clyde said.
Pandy poked holes in that stance, arguing signs of rising global temperatures have been seen in worsening natural disasters like wildfires in California and that “97% of scientists around the world agree climate change is real.”
“Humans may not have started it, but we are definitely making it exponentially worse,” Pandy said. “It wouldn’t be something that sets the entire West Coast on fire if it wasn’t real.”
Clyde also used the debate stage to tout his support for dismantling the IRS through a so-called FairTax levy on spending only, while Pandy called for establishing a universal basic income.
The election on Nov. 3 is poised to decide who in the 9th District will replace U.S. Rep. Doug Collins, R-Gainesville, who has opted to run for U.S. Senate. Early voting began Monday.
Georgia lawmakers meet in the state House of Representatives chamber at the Capitol in Atlanta during the 2020 legislative session. (Photo by Beau Evans)
Will the balance of power shift in the Georgia state legislature following the highly anticipated general election on Nov. 3?
For the first time in nearly two decades, Georgia Democratic leaders believe they have a real shot at wresting control of the state House of Representatives, which has been in Republican hands since 2005.
But state and national Republicans are deploying millions of dollars into local races to keep that from happening, targeting Georgia as perhaps the only state where one of its most influential Democratic lawmakers in the House could be toppled.
“For Democrats to flip the House, they have to win what looks like virtually all of the marginal seats now,” said Charles Bullock, professor of political science at the University of Georgia.
According to Bullock, Democratic candidates flipped 13 seats in the House during the 2018 election that they are likely not in danger of losing next month, prompting Democrats to focus on 17 other seats that could be won in the 2020 general election.
For Democrats, the magic number to flip the House is 16 seats out of the body’s total of 180 seats, representing a cluster of suburban Atlanta districts plus some districts around many of the state’s other urban areas including Athens, Milledgeville, Albany, Columbus, Savannah, Warner Robins and Suwanee.
The Georgia Senate is likely not in play with only five seats potentially open for Democrats that would cut the Republican majority in that body down to a four-seat advantage, according to Bullock’s analysis.
But the Georgia House is the holy grail this year. A shift in the balance of power would not only inject more say for Democrats into the state’s legislative policies, but also giving the party a stronger bargaining hand in the upcoming process to redraw district boundaries next summer.
Based on each new census count every 10 years, the Georgia General Assembly rearranges state and congressional district borders to align with shifts in population. Whichever political party is in charge of that process could tweak the boundaries in their favor to capture potentially decisive voting blocs for the next decade, according to Bullock.
“If the people who draw the districts have good data and are careful with it, they could cast the die in terms of what a legislature’s partisanship looks like for a decade,” Bullock said in an interview last week.
With demographics shifting around urban areas across the state, the key for Democrats will be to sway suburban women voters who may have voted for President Donald Trump in 2016 but have had second thoughts since then, said Andra Gillespie, political science professor at Emory University.
At the same time, some Republicans holding vulnerable seats have begun shifting closer to the center in a bid to win more moderate voters who could turn the tide in a close election, Gillespie said. An example is Rep. Chuck Efstration, R-Dacula, who sponsored bipartisan hate-crimes legislation in an election year that Georgia Democrats had long sought.
“The idea that they would then pick the low-hanging fruit of the hate-crimes bill which has stalled for years in the General Assembly, was the easy thing to do,” Gillespie said in an interview last week. “They’re trying to get a clear majority of the overall universe of voters in their district.”
Outside groups from both sides have pumped large dollars into contested legislative races, particularly for Republicans’ bid to unseat Georgia House Minority Leader Bob Trammell, D-Luthersville, whose West Georgia district went to Trump in 2016 and Gov. Brian Kemp in 2018.
The Republican State Leadership Committee (RSLC), a national group focused on state legislative contests, is poised to pump $1 million into the campaign of Trammell’s Republican competitor, emergency-medical helicopter pilot David Jenkins, marking a huge amount of money for one local race.
The strategy is twofold: By forcing Trammell to step back and focus on his own race, Democrats may have to spend more money on a single district than they anticipated and divert some attention from other competitive races elsewhere in the state, said RSLC President Austin Chambers.
“This is a great opportunity for us to take out the leader of their caucus,” Chambers said. “It just creates chaos on their side.”
Republicans also have the stout backing of Georgia House Speaker David Ralston, R-Blue Ridge, who as one of the party’s most influential leaders has leaned into the campaign season alongside other top Republican lawmakers at the state Capitol.
“Georgia Republicans aren’t taking anything or any vote for granted,” said Jen Ryan, a spokeswoman for the campaign efforts of Ralston and the House Majority Caucus.
Despite that confidence, Democrats aren’t sweating it. They are leaning on a party-affiliated organizing and fundraising initiative called the Legislative Victory Fund to splash millions of dollars into local legislative races across the state, including Trammell’s.
Tied to Fair Fight, the group founded by Democratic Party star and former gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, the Legislative Victory Fund has recruited and backed Democratic candidates in vulnerable Republican-held House districts from the campaign season’s start this year, said the fund’s organizing director, Patricia Lassiter.
“We are running a full-fledged, multi-faceted movement to show Georgia what needs to be done,” Lassiter said. “We know that once these candidates get into office, they’re going to change what Georgia looks like [and] leadership is going to actually represent Georgians.”
For his part, Trammell has swatted aside recent polls indicating he may be trailing in his race. He points to the big-money moves focused on his own district as evidence that Republicans are “holding on by their fingernails here.”
“They started pumping money into Georgia a few months ago because they know they’re in trouble,” Trammell said in a recent interview. “Voters in the district don’t want a vote that’s for sale. My vote is not for sale and will never be for sale.”
The general election is scheduled for Nov. 3. Early voting begins on Oct. 12.
Georgia lawmakers are looking at ways to boost the number of people who earn high-school and college degrees amid a changing labor market that is tending toward more automated technical jobs.
More than 1 million Georgians could become “unemployable” in the coming years due to a shift toward technology-driven jobs that people with lower levels of education cannot fill, according to Stephen Pruitt, president of the nonprofit Southern Regional Education Board.
Without access to adult education, those less-educated Georgians could be left in the lurch by 2030, particularly as the COVID-19 pandemic has sped up automated and online-focused jobs, Pruitt told a Georgia Senate study committee Thursday.
“The reality is we’re going to have plenty of jobs,” Pruitt said. “The question is whether we’re going to have people to take those jobs.”
The Senate Educating Adult Students Study Committee met for the first and perhaps only time Thursday to look at programs aimed at expanding the educational experience and skills of adult Georgians to match them with more stable, higher paying jobs.
The committee is tasked with drafting a report by December that may recommend changes to state education policies to better support adults in need of more learning and work-oriented credentials.
Georgia already leans on its technical college system to educate and train thousands of adults in job skills and push them toward opportunities for college education, said the system’s assistant commissioner for adult education, Cayanna Good.
Last year, more than 32,000 adults took classes through the technical college system and earned more 6,000 high-school equivalency certificates, plus nearly 700 skills-based credentials, Good said.
But Good said she also sees the writing on the wall for many low-skill, menial jobs that could fall by the wayside in the rise of automation.
“Every single day I worry about my cashiers,” Good said. “Those jobs are going to be automated. They’re all going away.”
Some companies and programs are looking to fill the gap. The international thrift-store chain Goodwill has run free adult education schools in several states since 2010 and is now on the cusp of piloting two new schools in Macon and Savannah.
On top of helping adult students complete courses they’re missing to attain degrees, the schools run by Goodwill also aim to give people exiting prison a chance to increase their ability to be hired and maintain steady employment.
“We’re asking other employers to give them a chance so they can change their lives,” said Al Stewart, business development director for Goodwill in Middle Georgia.
Sen. Lester Jackson, D-Savannah, suggested the Senate committee may need to meet more than once before December to delve deeper into whether course credits for technical college classes and other programs like Goodwill’s actually teach the skills needed to secure better employment.
“Clearly, we need to serve a lot more Georgians than we’re serving now,” Jackson said.
Trey Kilpatrick will serve as Gov. Brian Kemp’s new chief of staff starting on Oct. 15, 2020. (Photo from the Office of Gov. Brian Kemp)
Gov. Brian Kemp has tapped a former aide to retired U.S. Sen. Johnny Isakson to serve as his next chief of staff following the departure last month of his longtime top deputy.
Trey Kilpatrick, who served several roles for Isakson from 2009 to 2019 including deputy chief of staff, will start work as the governor’s chief of staff on Oct. 15.
An experienced campaigner with Isakson, Kilpatrick joins the Kemp administration at a pivotal time in which Georgia continues battling the COVID-19 pandemic and the governor gears up for his reelection bid in 2022.
“With his wealth of experience from both federal and state government, Trey is uniquely qualified to lead my administration,” Kemp said in a statement Wednesday. “Together, we will continue to put hardworking Georgians first – protecting lives and livelihoods as we battle COVID-19, reforming adoption and foster care, fighting human trafficking and prioritizing economic prosperity in every region of our state.”
Kilpatrick will not be the only tie between the Kemp administration and Isakson’s old office. Kemp appointed Isakson’s replacement in current U.S. Sen. Kelly Loeffler following the longtime senator’s retirement due to health concerns. Loeffler’s current chief of staff, Joan Carr, was also Isakson’s former chief of staff.
Kilpatrick served a short stint as vice president of governmental affairs for Georgia State University prior to joining the Kemp administration.
“I feel fortunate that I had the opportunity to work with a great Georgian like Senator Isakson for 10 years, and now have the opportunity to work with a principled leader like Governor Kemp in his administration,” Kilpatrick said.
Kemp’s last permanent chief of staff was Tim Fleming, a political strategist who first worked with Kemp on his winning bid for a Georgia Senate seat in 2002, then managed his campaign for secretary of state in 2010. He served several roles in that office following Kemp’s win.
In 2018, Fleming managed Kemp’s underdog campaign for governor that saw the long-shot candidate prevail in the Republican primary and defeat Democratic nominee Stacey Abrams by a narrow margin. Fleming then signed on as chief of staff at the start of Kemp’s new administration.
Fleming was replaced on an interim basis by Caylee Noggle, who was the state’s chief management officer and previously held top posts in the Georgia Student Finance Commission and the state Office of Planning and Budget.
Noggle was the first woman to serve as a governor’s chief of staff in Georgia.
