The election is in 94 days. Will the results be seen as legitimate?

It wasn’t just the voting machines that blew a fuse during Georgia’s primary election in June.

The rollout of 30,000 new voting machines, which required far more electrical capacity than their predecessors, would have been challenge enough for the state’s election officials, who scrambled to find polling locations with enough space, outlets, and wattage for the new equipment. Add the need for social distancing and a dearth of available poll workers, and counties were forced to reduce the number of polling places, leading to long lines – in some Black communities frustrated voters had to wait until after midnight to cast ballots.

“Even before you introduced the pandemic, the new voting machines were daunting,” says Dele Lowman Smith, a member of the Board of Elections in DeKalb County, a majority African-American county that includes part of the Atlanta metro area. “You layer the pandemic on top of that, and it was a nightmare scenario.”

The logjams occurred despite the fact that more than half of voters cast an absentee ballot – a 2,500% increase compared with the 2016 primary. It took more than a week to process all those ballots, delaying final results. In New York, where about 1 in 5 absentee ballots have been invalidated, it’s taken more than a month, prompting lawsuits.

The primaries in Georgia, New York, and Wisconsin earlier this year have been held up as examples of what could go wrong on Nov. 3 – how long lines, difficulties processing a surge of absentee ballots, and delayed results could open the door to narratives about voter suppression and voter fraud, undermining the legitimacy of an election widely

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