Officials in Georgia's most populous county, where election operations are already under review by the state, have fired two workers accused of shredding paper voter registration applications, according to a county statement released Monday. Preliminary information indicates that the employees checked out batches of applications for processing, and they are alleged to have shredded some of the forms, the Fulton County statement says. Fellow employees reported the alleged actions to their supervisor Friday morning, and the two employees were fired that day, the AP reports.
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 and other municipal officials. The deadline to register to vote in that election was Oct. 4. It’s not immediately clear whether the 300 voter registration records in question were lost, county spokeswoman Jessica Corbitt says. "Normally, processing a voter registration application involves entering them in the state system, updating them, verifying their information," she says. "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.
Fulton County Registration and Elections Director Rick Barron reported the allegations to the secretary of state's office of investigations. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican who has long criticized election operations in the heavily Democratic county, said in a news release that his office has launched an investigation and he called on the US Department of Justice to look into the county's elections. "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. (More Georgia stories.)
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