Willie R. Tubbs, FISM News
In Atlanta, a pair of county employees were fired after their boss said they shredded hundreds of voter applications within the last two weeks.
As first reported by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Fulton County Director of Registration & Elections Richard L. Barron announced the firings on Monday.
According to a press release from the county, the two employees shredded about 300 applications submitted in advance of the 2021 election cycle, which began today with the first day of early voting. Fulton County Commission Chairman Robb Pitts said in the release that he had submitted the matter to the country’s district attorney for investigation.
“Elections are the most important function of our government,” Pitts said in the release. “We have committed to transparency and integrity.”
Barron said the employees checked out batches of applications for processing, but instead destroyed the forms and were subsequently reported by fellow employees.
It is unclear what the workers hoped to achieve through this action. On Georgia voter applications, there is no method by which people can identify their party affiliation. However, applicants are asked to provide a race and gender.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger responded to this report both quickly (within minutes of Barron’s announcement) and vociferously. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that Raffesnperger had been made aware of the incident Friday, when Fulton County requested his office launch an investigation.
Raffensperger, via a press release, called upon the U.S. Department of Justice to intervene and also announced his own investigation into what he called a decades-long problem of faulty election oversight in Fulton County.
“After 20 years of documented failure in Fulton County elections, Georgians are tired of waiting to see what the next embarrassing revelation will be,” Raffensperger said. “The Department of Justice needs to take a long look at what Fulton County is doing and how their leadership disenfranchises Fulton voters through incompetence and malfeasance. The voters of Georgia are sick of Fulton County’s failures.”
Raffenserger has long been an outspoken critic of Fulton County elections and has frequently called for a change in leadership at the county level.
Following the 2020 presidential election, Georgia appointed a monitor to oversee Fulton County’s elections. This monitor found no evidence of fraud in the 2020 election but described the county’s election procedures as “badly managed, sloppy and chaotic”.
Earlier this year, the state assembly passed a polarizing and hotly-debated new law – SB 202, also known as the Election Integrity Act of 2021 – which contains language that allows for Raffensperger’s office to take over local election boards.