Fulton County, Georgia, Braces For A Massive Election

UNION CITY, Ga. Additional police will be present at the election headquarters in Fulton County, Georgia, this year just because of whats going on, LaShandra Little, voter education and outreach manager for the county, said euphemistically during a facility tour Monday. 

Just hours before Election Day, theres a lot going on in Fulton County. Fulton is Georgias most populous county and a Democratic stronghold that could provide the blue votes necessary to put Vice President Kamala Harris over the top, both in the state and, potentially, overall.  

This is also the countys first year using a mammoth new Election Hub facility. It takes up 400,000 square feet of a 1-million-square-foot warehouse in Union City, just outside Atlanta. And on Election Day eve, it was buzzing with anticipation. 

The Election Hub facility is imposing, looking from the outside like an Amazon warehouse. Inside, election machines are lined up in lengthy rows and election workers operate in neon vests and VOTE T-shirts. Throughout the building, they are organizing voter registration application forms, wheeling tabulator machines into place, and systematically opening the envelopes carrying absentee ballots a step called pre-processing that, at least in some states , allows the counting to proceed much more quickly Tuesday. Near a section reserved for election observers, a studio-apartment-sized room is walled in glass on all four sides. Inside sit the computers that will tally the countys results. 

Ahead of a press briefing Monday morning, Little gave a tour of the facility to dozens of members of the media who spoke a half a dozen languages among them. Across Fulton County, there will be about 2,000 election workers making the democratic process run on Tuesday, Little said. Of that, about 10% will be working out of the Election Hub. 

Ever since Donald Trump unsuccessfully pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, to find the thousands of votes necessary for him to overturn the will of the people in 2020, Georgia has faced intense public scrutiny under a microscope smudged by Trump and his allies lies about (nonexistent) widespread voter fraud. 

Rudy Giuliani was recently ordered by a judge to turn over a penthouse apartment and various luxury goods to two former Fulton County election workers whom he falsely accused of cheating and who successfully sued for defamation. Just recently, a fake video purported to show a Haitian immigrant with fraudulent ID cards who said theyd voted multiple times. Nonetheless, at least one prominent Republican shared it as if it were real. They are fighting so hard to steal this damn thing, Trump said Sunday . And he has never stopped lying about the 2020 election, insisting he won. 

Misinformation is the biggest challenge, Nadine Williams, the countys elections director, said at a news conference Monday. 

She has separately expressed concern about a large crowd that we can possibly get on election night, saying the county has trained for various scenarios along those lines. Officials hope the large new facility will make it easier for observers to watch the process as it unfolds.

As in 2020, polling places throughout the county will have a police officer assigned to them. Also, as memory cards with precinct-level ballot counts arrive at the Election Hub on Tuesday, they will have company: police escorts. 

Williams has extensive experience in the election department. But overall, Little said, the countys election team is pretty much all new. She herself started in 2021. That fits with a nationwide pattern of high turnover among election workers ever since Trump used lies to massively decrease public confidence in the Democratic process and turn civil servants into targets of harassment. 

Over 4 million people around the state  have voted early or by mail  in this election, Raffenspergers office said Saturday, and Raffensperger said he expects 1.1 million in-person voters Tuesday. In Fulton County specifically, officials said Monday they had already received thousands of mail-in ballots. Officials said they expected to be able to tally all of the advanced votes, and at least some of the absentee ballot votes, by 8 p.m. Tuesday. Assuming polls close on time, about 70% of ballots are expected to be counted and reported by 8 p.m. statewide, Raffensperger said at a press briefing Monday.