“While these issues are unfortunate,” Gabriel Sterling, a statewide voting-implementation manager, told a local TV station, “they are not issues of the equipment but a function of counties engaging in poor planning, limited training, and failures of leadership.” Kemp’s successor as secretary of state, the Republican Brad Raffensperger, echoed this message. In a statement, Raffensperger called the issues “unacceptable” and announced that he’d launched an investigation to “determine what these counties need to do to resolve these issues before November’s election.” He went on, “Obviously, the first time a new voting system is used there is going to be a learning curve, and voting in a pandemic only increased these difficulties. But every other county faced these same issues and were significantly better prepared to respond so that voters had every opportunity to vote.”

This kind of thinking did not sit well with county officials. “It’s astounding to me what an abdication of leadership that is,” Steve Bradshaw, a Dekalb County commissioner, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “to push the ownership down to the counties. I was raised that if you mess up, ’fess up.”

Continue