On the first Saturday of early voting ahead of Georgia’s May 19 primary, a torrential rainstorm swept across Glynn County. Early in the morning, a lightning strike hit one of the county’s three active early voting locations, instantly knocking out power to the facility. Making matters worse, local utility crews were already stretched thin supporting a neighboring county where severe drought had sparked a massive wildfire requiring emergency assistance and public safety coordination from Glynn County personnel.
Despite dark, muddy conditions and the loss of grid power, the response from election staff and poll workers was immediate. They flatly rejected the idea of closing up shop for the day, even when offered the option to move to a nearby unaffected polling location.
As Christina Redden, the assistant director for the county’s Board of Elections and Registration, recalled, the sentiment was unanimous: “We’re not going home.”
Instead of halting voting, the team activated immediate backup procedures that had been reviewed in all poll worker trainings. Georgia election system protocols ensure continuous voting through built-in redundancies. Because electronic pollbooks have a three-hour battery life and voting equipment (specifically ADA-accessible devices) must remain operational, staff immediately began shuttling battery packs between the main election office and voting sites. Three rotations of 10 battery packs at a time kept the equipment powered without having to pivot to emergency paper ballots.
The building’s large windows provided ample natural light, allowing poll workers to safely maintain operations throughout the outage. A portable generator arrived just before noon, and full power was restored within 20 minutes of its setup. Strikingly, despite the storm and technical hurdles, that location processed more voters that day than the other open voting sites.
As Redden observed after the event: “When you have a backup plan, you don’t make headlines.”
What It Means for Your Office
While election security discussions often center on high-level cyber threats or major natural disasters, local election officials know that operational risk often comes in smaller, unglamorous packages: a lightning strike, a broken power cord, or a local utility outage, to name a few. Glynn County’s experience highlights several core truths about election administration:
- Resilience Is Built into Everyday Rules: System redundancies only work if staff are trained to use them. Georgia’s framework ensures that voting does not stop simply because grid power fails.
- Micro-Disruptions Cause Macro-Headaches: It is easy for staff to tune out repetitive training focused exclusively on rare, cataclysmic events. In practice, it is the small, operational hiccups that can derail a polling location if workers aren’t prepared.
- After-Action Reviews Turn Friction into Blueprints: Reviewing what worked and what was tedious helps offices eliminate operational friction before the next election cycle.
Proactive Actions for Election Administrators
- Build Strong Regional Peer Networks: Establish communication networks with neighboring jurisdictions. Sharing public messaging channels, coordinating media communications, and housing loaner voting equipment and programming files across jurisdictions ensures a resilient support system. This issue’s Resource Library section provides a starting point for formalizing those relationships.
- Incorporate Micro-Scenario Tabletop Exercises (TTXs): Reviewing everyday hiccups and minor disruptions prompts workers to think creatively in a low-stakes environment. Integrate small-scale scenario tools, such as the U.S. Election Assistance Commission’s (EAC) Election Scenario Test Deck, into poll worker training.
- Pre-Position Backup Power On-Site: Eliminate midday logistical scrambles by staging backup power before doors open. Following their After Action Review, Glynn County updated its operational plan to keep 30 extra charged battery packs stationed directly at early voting locations starting on Day 1, eliminating the need to shuttle batteries back and forth.
- Design Facilities with Emergency Continuity in Mind: Audit the physical layout of your polling places and election office for emergency capacity. When Glynn County constructed its main office in 2022, officials designated a 4,000-square-foot public voting area backed by a commercial gas generator, ensuring the main office can absorb voting operations if a satellite facility is closed for an extended period.
- Build Strong Regional Peer Networks: Establish communication networks with neighboring jurisdictions. Sharing public messaging channels, coordinating media communications, and housing loaner voting equipment and programming files across jurisdictions ensures a resilient support system. This issue’s Resource Library section provides a starting point for formalizing those relationships.
The Situation Room focuses on real security incidents and threats in the news relevant to election security. To review previous issues, see the newsletter archive.