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On Tuesday, voters in Georgia went to cast their ballots in primary elections, but many of them found that they could not—or not without a long wait. Voters in the Atlanta area, in particular, faced huge lines and hours-long delays outside polling places; a disproportionate number of those voters were Black. As the day progressed, reports emerged about new voting machines that were malfunctioning or missing altogether. Public-health measures, instituted to prevent voters from spreading COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus, exacerbated the delays. There were problems with mail-in ballots, too. Democratic politicians blamed the state’s Republican leadership for the mess; the Republicans blamed local Democrats. “There are no clear answers of exactly one thing that caused the breakdown,” Tia Mitchell, a reporter with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, said on The Takeaway. “There are probably many.”
The confusion didn’t stop news organizations from prominently covering the problems. The New York Times used drone footage to demonstrate just how long the lines were. Politico ran the headline, “A hot, flaming mess”; on Wednesday, the Journal-Constitution’s front page splashed the words, “COMPLETE MELTDOWN.” News networks cut to reporters on the ground; one of them, Blayne Alexander, of NBC News, said she had waited in line for 2 hours and 19 minutes before casting her vote. Many stories noted Georgia’s history of voter suppression, and suggested that the debacle was a poor omen for November, when the state is expected to be in play in the presidential election, and voter turnout in
Read more here: https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/georgia_voter_suppression_election.php