Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger defended four blue Atlanta-area counties that opened election offices over the weekend to accept straggling absentee ballots, but he said Fulton County, in particular, should have communicated about it better.
Raffensperger, a Republican, said he thought Gwinnett County election officials handled the process more transparently because they decided over the summer that their county would extend absentee ballot acceptance.
Fulton County, a Democratic stronghold and the most populous county in the state, was, on the other hand, “relatively late,” Raffensperger said.
“What I will say is our policy has been we’d like to know what the rules are up front,” he said. “We’d like people to have consistency, and Gwinnett County was receiving absentee ballots, they had people at their offices, but they had made that decision back in July, and Fulton’s was relatively late, and I think that’s not really helpful because then people have to respond to that, so I think it caught some people unaware.”
Raffensperger did not address when the other two counties, DeKalb and Cobb, announced their decisions to extend absentee ballot acceptance through the weekend.
Raffensperger’s remarks came in response to a legal debacle over the weekend during which Georgia Republicans blasted the four counties for extending absentee ballot acceptance at a handful of election offices, accused local officials of shutting out poll watchers at the offices, and filed a lawsuit against Fulton County over the extension.
In response to the lawsuit, a judge ruled on Saturday during a virtual hearing that opening election offices to accept weekend absentee ballots was legal. The Georgia Republican Party had argued in a complaint that Fulton County illegally opened drop box access, but state officials countered that no drop boxes were used.
Regarding poll watchers, Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Whatley said on X that after pushing for poll watching access, the GOP was granted access to observe the offices that were opened.
Gabriel Sterling, a top official in the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office, said in a statement on X that “no laws were broken” and that Fulton County accepted 104 extra ballots on Saturday as a result of the extension.
Republicans remain dissatisfied, however.
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An RNC official told the Washington Examiner on Monday that the GOP was escalating the lawsuit and that it was still making its way through the Georgia court system. The official said the RNC believed the four counties “were at the last minute making a pretty radical change” and that it only served to “drive down voter confidence.”
Georgia Republican Party Chairman Josh McKoon suggested over the weekend that the move by blue counties to extend ballot acceptance was because mail-in voting was down in those counties compared to Republican counties in the state.
