Chatham County’s voter registration office said Friday that some absentee ballots issued for next month’s elections were lost in the mail, adding that it was “actively working” to remedy what the office’s supervisor termed a “technical error.”
The public acknowledgement comes 12 days before elections that are expected, due to low voter turnout, to be decided by razor-thin margins. It is also likely to fuel pressure, beginning with President Donald Trump and including Georgia’s State Election Board, to scrap most — if not all — forms of mail-in voting in the state and nationwide.
What happened to the missing ballots still isn’t known.
CHECK YOUR BALLOT
- For questions or to confirm your absentee ballot status, please contact the Chatham County Voter Registration Office at 912-790-1520 or email voter@chathamcounty.org.
To process absentee ballots for the Nov. 4 election, Chatham’s voter registration office hired a third-party vendor in Raleigh, North Carolina, to print the ballots and transfer the stuffed and labeled envelopes to the U.S. Postal Service for delivery to voters who applied for them. Why the voter registration opted for an out-state vendor over a Georgia firm one isn’t clear.
On Oct. 15, a batch of 533 absentee ballots processed by the vendor were transferred to a post office and logged into its system, according to Sabrina German, the office’s supervisor, as well as a statement issued by the registrar’s office on Friday.
Of the 999 applications for mail-in ballots accepted in Chatham County, only six had been returned by late Friday.
Some of the ballots went missing — German told The Current late Friday she wasn’t sure how many — and it wasn’t until voters began phoning and emailing the offices of the election board and the registrar’s office, asking about the whereabouts of their absentee ballots, that the county began looking into it.
In its statement, the registrar’s office said it had taken steps to mitigate the error. A second absentee ballot was sent to “all affected voters” to “ensure that every voter receives a ballot in a timely manner.” It also cautioned that any voters who received more than one ballot to complete and return only one, and that ballots are tracked through the state Secretary of State’s office.
German, who reported the missing ballots to the five-member Board of Registrars at its regularly scheduled meeting on Wednesday, also sought to reassure Chatham voters.
“I am glad that we caught it in enough time that we were able to send out a second ballot and that the voters will still have the same chance to actually vote in this particular election.”
Adding momentum
Despite those assurances, the lapse by the registrar’s office seems certain to sow confusion and anger among absentee ballot voters, some of whom have received two absentee ballots. It also could throw a wrench into what is also expected to be a very tight election next month.
Election races decided by hundreds, even scores, of votes mean, among other things, that the missing absentee ballots could form the basis of a legal challenge to the vote. As of Friday, 6,645 out of Chatham County’s 231,196 registered voters — or 2.8% — had cast ballots in early in-person voting, according to the registrar’s office website.
More broadly, it adds momentum to calls for curbs in mail-in voting.
Though nearly 1-in-3 Americans voted by mail in the 2024 presidential election, President Trump appears determined to rid U.S. elections of mail-in voting, which he blames in part for his election defeat at the hands of Joe Biden in 2020.
“Mail-in ballots are corrupt. You can never have a real democracy with mail-in ballots,” he said during an Oval Office news conference in August.
“And we as a Republican Party are going to do everything possible to get rid of mail-in ballots,” starting with an executive order that’s being written right now by the best lawyers in the country” to end their use.
For critics of mail-in voting and Georgia’s election system, the timing of the registrar office’s lapse also couldn’t be more fortuitous.
The Republican-dominated State Election Board recommended last week that state lawmakers ban no-excuse absentee voting with one GOP board member, Janice Johnston, arguing that the practice increases the risk of voter fraud.
Looming ahead is a possible investigation of the Chatham registrar’s office by the SEB, which is likely to see in the lapse an opportunity ahead of next year’s mid-term elections to put the operations of the Democratic-run county under a microscope.
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