Stephanie Lopez-Burgos stood in line about 35 minutes when she went to vote early in Georgia’s Senate runoff election and felt lucky it wasn’t longer. She saw social media posts from many Hall County residents who waited more than an hour — some of whom had to leave without voting.
“People are already living paycheck to paycheck,” she said. “Not working for an hour to go vote can be the difference of a bill not getting paid.”
New data shows typical wait times decreased at early voting sites for the January runoff in most of Georgia’s large counties compared with the November general election, partly due to a shorter ballot. But that wasn’t true in both Hall and another large county in the Atlanta area, Cobb, each of which has sizable communities of color and where voters faced lengthy waits.
Read more at The Center for Public Integrity.