Dekalb County Board of Elections Meeting 09/14/20

Chair Sam Tillman

Dele Lowman Smith

Susan Motter

Anthony Lewis

Booky N. Vu

Elections Superintendent Erica Hamilton

Combined notes from meeting: PG volunteer Liz Throop and Jesse Orrock

Early voting will start 10-12 and end on 10-30.

We have 11 confirmed early voting sites as of now and plan on adding an additional 3 or 4. We will finalize our early voting sites during our meeting next week.

We have 24 drop boxes right now. 15 have been deployed, 3 are in the office waiting to deploy and 6 more will arrive here tomorrow. It is possible that we add an additional 11 at some point before the 11-3 election. Currently we have added drop boxes for the Toco Hills library, Ellenwood library and city of Decatur. The city of Avondale and the city of Clarkeston have reached out to us about adding additional drop boxes in their area. We will post locations of drop boxes and the dates of when they will be installed on our website in the near future.

Voters can drop off absentee ballots at all early voting locations.

Dele Smith: We need more staff and adequate resources for our office so that we can expand early voting hours and finish tabulating absentee ballots within a few days after the election.

A motion has been passed to provide the BOE with adequate staff and resources.

Spokesperson for Dekalb Commissioner Johnson: I think in Commissioner Johnson’s office it was recommended that we extend early voting to 9pm. We have the money and the resources to extend the early voting times by an hour or 2. We have committed to give whatever is needed for our citizens to have expanded voting access. 

We have 24 drop boxes right now, we have money and resources for another 11 boxes.

Next week we will install a call center that can answer basic questions about voting.

We have processed 80,000 absentee ballot applications.

We will start sending out absentee ballots later this week.

All of our early voting locations should have at least 25 machines.

Poll worker training for the 9-29 election has already started.  

Did you know that the public can attend Board of Registration and Elections meetings? 

These meetings are open to the public by Georgia law. Georgia Open Meetings Act.

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