Earlier this month, the Democrat-controlled Fulton County Commission voted not to accept a vote from the appointed county elections board to fire Elections Director Richard Barron. A Democrat on the board voted with the two Republicans to oust Barron. But this clash over Barron’s job status also puts the spotlight on what has occurred with elections in Georgia’s most populous county over the last decade.
Besides the board’s criticism of Barron’s incompetence and mismanagement, there are two other issues to consider:
- If the independent Fulton election board does not have the ability to hire and fire the director that it oversees, then what’s the point in having a board since it can’t hold the director accountable?
- By the majority Democrats on the County Commission insisting that they must ratify the decision of the Elections Board (the Fulton County Code is not clear, hence part of the debate), the commissioners are now putting themselves directly in control of county elections in which they are on the ballot every four years. And some commissioners coming before the voters next year, including Chairman Robb Pitts.
Richard Barron
Fulton Countians who have been paying attention know its elections have been a debacle for years. (Barron has been director for eight years). A special Secretary of State monitor was even appointed in 2020 to specifically oversee Fulton County. There has been basically no chain of custody (arguably the most important thing in protecting elections) under Barron’s watch and Fulton had to go back and re-certify the November elections after certifying it for the January runoff— and after Barron testified that all the ballots were accounted for. And by the way, Fulton has approximately 28 cases involving them that have been referred by the state Election Board to the attorney general’s office for investigation.
Bear in mind that the November 3 election had to be re–certified following the hand recount, since Fulton was over 800 ballots off the original machine count. And it’s important to remember that Fulton was still updating the cast ballots to the Secretary of State’s office 12 days following the election which included many mailed-in absentee ballots and “discovered” memory cards.
Fulton Elections Board member Dr. Kathleen Ruth, in a statement given to InsiderAdvantage, underscores that “the independent, non-partisan state Election Board report highlighted numerous mismanagement and procedural issues. This report is the product of 270 hours of observing every aspect of Fulton County’s election processes, personnel and use of technologies.” Some big takeaways from the report include:
- The absentee processing system at Fulton Government Headquarters:
- No chain of custody forms being used as ballots moved from room to room
- Mask-optional policy putting essential staff at unnecessary risk for COVID
- No process to sufficiently protect spoiled and rejected ballots in the mail room
- Using an outdated version of Easy Vote to check in voters and poor record keeping for ENET. This resulted in voters receiving multiple absentee ballots.
- Persistent chain of custody issues: ballots were being delivered to State Farm Arena in unsecured mail carts is very concerning.
- Failure to do intake counts for the provisional ballots
- Technology issues abounded during the recount. The server crash on November 29 was a costly error caused by a failure to properly follow protocols for backing up and uploading data to the servers.
- January 5 run-off results had to be recertified due to 2 precincts not being tabulated.
Ruth concludes that these errors and inefficiencies obviously waste taxpayer dollars and undermine voter confidence. “Fulton County has over 800,000 voters and is as large as six states,” she notes. The elections board ouster of Barron was a bipartisan vote, and she emphasizes that “the elections department needs new leadership that can take Fulton to the next level: modernize our election processes and make the county election system more accurate, cost-effective and efficient. As Georgia’s largest county, Fulton should be the model for elections.”
