COBB COUNTY, Ga. — Cobb County election officials are busy preparing for election day.
Director of Elections Tate Fall, gave Channel 2 Cobb County Bureau Chief Michele Newell an exclusive look at some of the work her team has been doing to ensure everything runs smoothly come November.
“We’re feeling really great. The team is really solid. We’re at where we need to be in our planning process and our testing process,” Fall said.
Over 2,500 pieces of voting equipment are being tested and certified.
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“Every single piece of voting equipment is tested before it’s deployed. We test every touch screen for calibration. We make sure that how we are marking the ballot is how it’s printing out. How it’s printing out is how it’s being scanned. We’ll test the printer to make sure the ink levels are at the right place so we don’t have stray marks from the rulers. We print a lot of ballots so those rulers get dirty,’ said Fall.
The election warehouse is where all of the voting equipment is stored and tested.
“We have emergency ballot bags and all the critical supplies that go in here with lifts where everything goes at the end of the night,” Fall said.
Just beyond the doors of the election warehouse are training rooms where poll workers have spent much of their time.
“We have a lot of poll worker training going on. Four classes a day, six days a week. We’ve trained 70% of our poll workers so far. All of our early voting workers have been trained,” Fall said.
The safety of poll workers, in particular, is a priority.
“We’ve increased the de-escalation training that our poll managers are receiving,” Fall said.
Plans to equip poll managers with panic buttons have changed, instead they’ll use radios, an idea Fall is crediting the county 911 center for.
“Those panic buttons are connected to the poll managers cellphones and they would have to use their own cellphones. In order to coordinate 148 different smartphone download apps, we got a little worried about the implementation. We called our partners at 911 and they came up with this really great solution. On election day they’ll be connected to a special 911 dispatcher that is set up just to take their calls,” Fall said.
Voters will notice an increase in sheriff’s deputies.
“One thing people will noticed at early voting is an increased sheriff’s presence. We’ll have sheriff’s deputies roaming between two sites. The first two weeks and that last week of early voting we will have one sheriff’s deputy at every single site the entire time it’s open, just to help increase that presence and make sure that everyone feels safe,” Fall said.
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Overall, Fall is feeling confident about election day and said she is ready for any changes.
“I always tell people my job is to follow the law so when there’s a new law that’s passed we’ll make a way to make it happen. We’re working closely with our partners and other metro Atlanta counties to see what best practices are going to be. We will make sure our poll workers are trained appropriately that they have the supplies they need to complete any tasks on election day. We feel really solid in our ability to execute this election as best as we can,” Fall said.
Fall was hired as the Director of Cobb County Elections nearly one year ago.
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