re: EVIDENCE PRESENTED AT HEARING TODAY SHOWS STACEY ABRAMS RAN FULTON COUNTY ELECTIONS

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Though the county has been criticized for its reliance on temporary workers, Richard Barron, Fulton’s director of elections and registration, said Happy Faces saves the county money due to the fact that starting around 2015, its supplemental staff could no longer work as full-time employees because of the Affordable Cares Act’s definition of full-timers as anyone working at least 30 hours a week.

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shows former Democrat gubernatorial candidate

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Hundreds of workers assigned to county poll sites were recruited and trained by the Democrat-run Georgia chapter of the ACLU and a minority-owned temp agency run by Democrat donors, according to documents obtained by RealClearInvestigations. Most of them were young and inexperienced. Before the election, the ACLU urged anyone “threatened with prosecution” over double-voting allegations to contact the chapter for legal assistance. It is now signing up poll workers for the January 5 runoff races. And the temp agency, Happy Faces Personnel Group, remains under contract with the county to supply workers for that critical election, despite complaints from poll managers and poll watchers that its recruits were “poorly trained” and “highly partisan.” The Georgia runoffs will determine control of the Senate.

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Voyles, who has been helping manage polls in Fulton County for 20 years, complained that Democratic county officials entrusted the ACLU of Georgia with training election workers in how to screen out voters trying to cast two ballots. She noted that the ACLU chapter is a political activist group that appears more interested in defending people who vote twice than stopping them and reporting them to authorities. Before the presidential election, the state’s ACLU chapter urged anyone “threatened with prosecution” over double-voting allegations to contact them for “legal assistance.” “The ACLU of Georgia invites anyone threatened with prosecution for allegedly voting two times in the primary election to request legal assistance by contacting the organization as soon as possible,” according to a Sept. 8 press release. Despite the potential conflict, Voyles said a lawyer trained by the ACLU was put in charge of policing double-voting at her precinct. “I was not happy the ACLU was there,” Voyles said. “I do not trust them.” In fact, Fulton County allowed the ACLU to station lawyers at each of its 255 polling sites, replacing poll managers and overriding normal county procedures for catching absentee voters who show up at polls. This “new policy” was designed to “simplify” the process. Fulton County was not alone. All told, the ACLU recruited, trained and deployed more than 2,700 election workers at polls across the state on November 3. It also helped recruit “technicians” to help operate and “troubleshoot“ the machines of Dominion Voting Systems. ACLU recruiters targeted younger Georgians for the election work, many of whom had no previous experience checking in voters, and put them through a special training program separate from the county’s. “Don’t think of yourself as ‘inexperienced,’ “ an ACLU organizer told recruits in an October 8 training session, according to notes from the meeting. “Prepare to walk in and take a leadership role, even as a first-time poll worker.”

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In addition to the ACLU recruits, more than 340 poll workers — including those screening absentee voters, counting votes, canvassing votes, auditing votes and even supervising poll workers — were contracted over to Fulton County through a minority-owned temp agency that doesn’t specialize in recruiting or training election workers. Many of the temps from the agency — Tucker, Georgia-based Happy Faces — were described as partisan, inexperienced and poorly trained by poll managers and monitors who worked alongside them. The “statewide contract” for Happy Faces’ 2020 election staffing was valued at almost $7 million, according to Fulton County documents. The Fulton deal was approved by Robb Pitts, the Democratic chairman of the Fulton County Board of Commissioners. Listed as contract administrator for Happy Faces was chief financial officer and staffing manager Edwina Berry Hairston, who appears in Federal Election Commission records as a Democratic donor. Phone calls and emails to Fulton County went unanswered. But county officials explained in a 2019 document to the commissioners board that they needed to hire Happy Faces because staffing the polls in 2020 would be a “time-consuming effort,” and Happy Faces could “cut out the work by handling everything from recruitment, background checks, orientation, payroll and other processes for our deadline-driven election calendar.” They assured the board that approving the contract for Happy Faces would result in “a successful conduct of the upcoming 2020 presidential election.” But some Fulton County poll managers and watchers were not happy with the election-related tasks they performed, noting that Happy Faces workers were often rude, incompetent and openly discussed politically sensitive topics. “The workers from this temp organization employed by Fulton County have no experience, and there are some who are incompetent. And many are highly partisan,” said Garland Favorito, a certified poll watcher who runs VoterGa.org, one of the leading advocates for election integrity in the state. Added Voyles: “We had an issue with Happy Faces temps, who were given managerial responsibilities but had never worked in any election at all. Their training was inadequate. They were even instructed to ignore basic Georgia law and allow people from other counties or precincts to vote [in her Fulton County precinct].” Happy Faces, which does not list elections work among the areas of “top talent” it provides, did not respond to requests for comment. But a brochure on its website maintains that it is “dedicated to consistently surpassing service performance standards.” The temp agency is under contract to also staff polls for the January 5 runoffs.

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