{"id":4635,"date":"2020-06-10T08:07:00","date_gmt":"2020-06-10T08:07:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/galeo.org\/2020\/06\/georgia-debe-proteger-la-democracia-y-reformar-las-elecciones\/"},"modified":"2023-02-09T19:26:43","modified_gmt":"2023-02-09T19:26:43","slug":"georgia-debe-proteger-la-democracia-y-reformar-las-elecciones","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/galeo.org\/es\/2020\/06\/georgia-debe-proteger-la-democracia-y-reformar-las-elecciones\/","title":{"rendered":"Georgia debe proteger la democracia y reformar las elecciones"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Contact: Gabrielle Abbott,\u00a0Gabrielle@AllVotingisLocal.org<\/a>, 773.369.5358<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Voting rights leaders warn that failures of June 9 primary must not be repeated <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

ATLANTA \u2014 <\/strong>In a telephone press briefing, leaders from All Voting is Local, Asian Americans Advancing Justice, the Coalition for the People\u2019s Agenda, Common Cause Georgia, the Georgia Association of Latino Elected Officials, Georgia NAACP, and the New Georgia Project, urged Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and State Election Board members to do their job to ensure the  devastating failures of Tuesday\u2019s primary are not repeated in November. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Raffensperger and state officials denied counties the necessary resources to run free and fair elections, silencing voters, many of them Black and Brown. Despite postponing the election twice, the state officials failed to prepare, resulting in chaos<\/a> including: more than 7 hour wait times to cast a ballot, polling places not having basic equipment like ballot paper or functional voting machines, and police showing up at polling places to attempt to remove volunteers who were helping voters. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The audio recording of the briefing can be found here<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cInstitutional racism is alive \u2013 we need not look further than our failing elections,\u201d said Aklima Khondoker, Georgia state director of All Voting is Local<\/strong>. \u201cIt\u2019s unsurprising that long lines, voting machine break-downs, and lack of basics are most prevalent in Black and Brown communities. It\u2019s not because of the pandemic. It\u2019s not because of the poll workers or the boards of elections. Contrary to the secretary of state\u2019s assertions, these problems are his doing. The secretary of state must act now to protect our elections and dismantle racist and longstanding barriers to voting.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe as voters are being blamed for voter suppression instead of the institution that\u2019s suppressing our vote,\u201d said Stephanie Cho, Executive Director of Asian Americans Advancing Justice \u2013 Atlanta.<\/strong> \u201cWe need to make huge overhauls to ensure this doesn\u2019t happen in the general election\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYesterday was completely avoidable,\u201d said <\/strong>Nse Ufot, executive director of the New Georgia Project<\/strong>.<\/strong> \u201cI have to wonder if we were all witness to a direct attack on our democracy, and a trial run for what we should expect to see for the runoffs in August, and possibly November. The silver lining from yesterday was watching Georgians of all races be determined to stand in line and cast their vote.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe have to ensure that our election officials do the job and the proper planning that they should have done, so that we would not have these barriers in our communities,\u201d said Helen Butler, executive director of the Georgia Coalition for the People\u2019s Agenda<\/strong>. \u201cWe will not tolerate the same things that happened yesterday. We expect better and we are going to demand better. \u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cDespite the confusion, voters stood their ground and voted,\u201d said Jerry Gonzalez, executive director of GALEO.<\/strong> \u201cVoters in this state do want to exercise their right to vote and we need to ensure that voting is safe, free, and fair. The performance by our elections officials was abysmal.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cDuring the chaos of yesterday, we saw a lot of finger-pointing, a lot of blame-shifting, and a lot of political ping pong, rather than efforts to mitigate or solve the problems,\u201d said Aunna Dennis, Executive Director of Common Cause Georgia. <\/strong>\u201cThis is simply unacceptable. We cannot let this happen again.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIn many ways, the securing and administration of this year\u2019s primary election has been a complete failure,\u201d said James Woodall<\/strong>, state president of the Georgia NAACP<\/strong>. \u201cThe effect of Georgia\u2019s lack of preparedness is compounded by the state\u2019s failure to adhere to recommendations put forth by this coalition months ago and accountability is of the most urgent priority.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Advocates previously sent a letter<\/a> to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and State Election Board members, urging them to fix ballot issues and polling place safety concerns before June 9. The letter can be found here<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

###<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Contact: Gabrielle Abbott,\u00a0Gabrielle@AllVotingisLocal.org, 773.369.5358 Voting rights leaders warn that failures of June 9 primary must not be repeated  ATLANTA \u2014 In a telephone press briefing, leaders from All Voting is Local, Asian Americans Advancing Justice, the Coalition for the People\u2019s Agenda, Common Cause Georgia, the Georgia Association of Latino Elected Officials, Georgia NAACP, and the New Georgia […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sfsi_plus_gutenberg_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_show_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_type":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_alignemt":"","sfsi_plus_gutenburg_max_per_row":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4635","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sin-categorizar"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/galeo.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4635","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/galeo.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/galeo.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/galeo.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/galeo.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4635"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/galeo.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4635\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4662,"href":"https:\/\/galeo.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4635\/revisions\/4662"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/galeo.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4635"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/galeo.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4635"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/galeo.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4635"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}