Two Georgia election workers from the state’s most populous county were fired on Friday for allegedly shredding voting applications in the past two weeks.
Fulton County revealed in a statement on Monday that, according to a preliminary review, two employees may have checked out batches of applications for processing but allegedly shredded a portion of the forms instead of fully processing them.
The county statement says the applications were received in the past two weeks. Fulton County includes most of the city of Atlanta, where voters are set to go to the polls Nov. 2 to elect a mayor, City Council members and other municipal officials. The deadline to register to vote in that election was October 4.
It’s not immediately clear whether the 300 voter registration records in question were lost, county spokeswoman Jessica Corbitt said.
“Normally, processing a voter registration application involves entering them in the state system, updating them, verifying their information,” she said. “That is the matter that’s under investigation — was that process completed.”
Voters don’t register by party in Georgia, so the applications had no party affiliation.
Fellow employees reported the conduct to their supervisor on Friday morning, according to Fulton County. The two election workers were fired that day.
The illicit behavior reportedly occurred within the last two weeks, according to Fulton County Registration and Elections Director Richard Barron.
Raffensperger, in response to the report that the election workers were fired for allegedly shredding applications, called on the Justice Department to investigate Fulton County elections. He said his office has already started a probe into the new allegations.
The monitor, Carter Jones, who had previous experience working on elections in other parts of the world, observed the county’s election processes from October through January, and said he observed sloppy practices and poor management but saw no evidence of “any dishonesty, fraud or intentional malfeasance.”
Georgia’s State Election Board in August appointed a review panel to investigate Fulton County’s handling of elections after receiving requests from Republican lawmakers who represent the county. The lawmakers used a controversial provision of the state’s sweeping new election law to trigger a process that could ultimately lead to a takeover of elections in the county.
Any Fulton County resident who tries to vote in an upcoming election and is found not to be registered will be able to vote using a provisional ballot, and an investigation will follow, the county statement says.
