After November election blunders, Cobb officials to review absentee ballot process

As outgoing Elections Director Jennine Everly prepares to depart Cobb County and a job she has held for decades, steps have been announced by Cobb County election officials to address the administrative blunders that led to 1,000 absentee ballots not being mailed on time for the November election. 

Officials blamed the failure to mail the requested absentee ballots on an employee, however, the mistake was not discovered until weeks later. 

Once the error was discovered, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit on behalf of several absentee voters. Cobb Superior Court Judge Kellie Hill acted quickly to extend the deadline to accept absentee ballots. 
This announcement follows a review of the elections division’s absentee ballot processing by the county’s audit department. The audit department also conducted a review of the absentee ballot process during the recent Mableton municipal elections held in March to identify gaps and opportunities for improvement.

Latona Thomas, director of the county’s Internal Audit Department, presented the report to the Board of Elections after conducting the review, which disclosed that administrative mistakes led to the error involving over 1000 absentee ballots not being mailed to voters who had requested them.

Thomas said, “The overall internal control environment over absentee (ballots) will be stronger once they implement a lot of the recommendations. In a lot of cases, there wasn’t anything in place, or if they had something (logged) manually, we’re recommending that it be automated.”

The audit department made several recommendations to the Board of Elections including automated reporting at several steps in the process and verification to ensure any mistakes are identified quickly. The recommended changes include tapping into existing elections software that allows the user to request automated reports at multiple steps in the ballot process. Many within the community wondered why this software, which was in their possession and readily available, was not already being followed by Cobb Elections.

Auditors also recommend logging the number of ballots as they are returned; securing ballots within the absentee ballot department; and logging ballot counts at each step on a daily basis with employee initials and supervisor verification. During her report, Thomas also touched on the efficient use of resources and that efficiency would be crucial to making it easier to handle moving forward. They also pointed to equitable workloads for election workers and a clear understanding of assignments during the different phases of the process. 

It was also announced by Cobb Elections that an absentee ballot manager will be added to the process to help implement these recommendations.