I have come around to believing that Georgia needs to be contested by Democrats, but I could still see the GOP narrowly succeeding here almost entirely because of the voting shenanigans we saw on Tuesday having the potential to repeat itself.
The "shenanigans" that occurred on Tuesday largely had absolutely nothing do with the Secretary of State's office or the GOP broadly-speaking. While this doesn't apply to the relatively large sum of people who never received their mail ballots (this time, it was handled by SoS), the lines, missing equipment, faulty machinery and general lack of skill was entirely on county boards of election and precinct workers.
I've been meaning to do an autopsy on it, but needless to say there were/are several verification steps and choke-points in between the SoS and local elections officials that put the burden squarely on the latter: sheer incompetence at its finest rather than malicious intent.
So it was like a Brenda Snipes scenario? Why did Scott never get blamed for voter suppression?
Isn't the SoS also in part responsible for the training for county-level election employees?
With the new system/machines implemented for this election, every county had to sign off on the number of machines and equipment they received (standardized formula based on each county's RVs as I recall; something like 1 machine for every 250 people), and also had to sign off on their counties either completing adequate training either held by themselves with SoS-provided resources or attend one of the in-person/virtual training sessions offered.
In the end, you still had old ladies trying to ram memory cards into machines for an hour straight before thinking to even
turn them over and try the other side.
There are also multiple other points at which each county had to verify functionality and availability, including required tests of every machine, memory card, cables, scanners, etc a few days prior to the election and delivery of machines/equipment to each precinct the night before/morning of the election.
In reality, there were basically 4 chokepoints at which county elections officials had an opportunity to report receiving inadequate numbers of machines or equipment, obtain proper training for their precinct workers, test the machines (and equipment, thereby verifying it was accounted for) and delivering the equipment to each precinct.
The counties and precincts screwed up - and it was overwhelmingly in Democratic counties and precincts where election boards are controlled by Democrats. The state screwed up delivery of some mail ballots, but the state has never handled mail ballot delivery prior - and certainly not in the millions. I'm sure given that most counties had 5-10x the number of mail ballots this time, had they had to handle them as they're usually required, the usual suspects would have screwed it up to a similar extent.
This of course was also the first statewide test of an entirely new voting system. People taking longer to vote as they get familiar with the system increased wait times (as did poll workers not being familiar, either), and social distancing physically lengthened lines.
