Nearly 3,000 voters in key Georgia county haven’t received mail ballots with time running out, lawsuit alleges

Nearly 2,900 voters in one Georgia county have yet to receive the absentee ballots they recently applied for and are blaming their local officials’ hiring of an out-of-town vendor for the delays, they charge in a lawsuit filed Tuesday*.

A Cobb County voter, on behalf of himself and the full group, is asking a judge to immediately order the local election board to overnight absentee ballots to voters who are now in danger of missing the Nov. 3 deadline for returning their votes. That would effectively disenfranchise them through no fault of their own, the lawsuit contends. 

The election board hired the New York-based vendor Fort Orange Press to manage the county’s absentee ballots, according to the complaint.

“Thousands of Cobb County voters did everything right by requesting their absentee ballots weeks in advance of Georgia’s election-day receipt deadline, yet they have been left in the cold with no absentee ballot at all, in violation of state law,” the complaint states.  

Cobb County is a major Democratic stronghold, where 57% of voters supported Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024. Georgia hosts a pivotal U.S. Senate race this year.

The delays are affecting ballots that voters applied for since Oct. 6, when the early voting season began. During early voting, the county must issue ballots (or rejections or provisionals) to those who applied for them within three days, by state law. But voters who applied between Oct. 6 and Oct. 15 still haven’t received them, according to the lawsuit, despite the state’s voter website saying they’ve been issued. 

As a result, Cobb County currently has abysmally low rates of returned absentee ballots, compared with much of the rest of the state, according to the complaint. 

Less than 14% of absentee ballots have been returned by voters in Cobb County. That’s well below the 44% return rate in neighboring Fulton County and the 71% return rate in nearby Paulding County. The statewide return rate, meanwhile, is 50%, according to state voting data cited in the complaint. 

Cobb County’s “anemic” return rate is also significantly lower than its own rates in prior elections: 32% had been returned during the same period in 2024, and in 2022 the county’s rate was 56%. 

Two other Georgia counties are also suffering from low return absentee ballot rates: Gwinnett and DeKalb, both of which, like Cobb, are part of Metro Atlanta’s core, and where the metro’s most diverse populations reside. In Gwinnett, only 12.5%of absentee ballots were returned, while DeKalb’s rate is 8%. 

Both counties also hired Fort Orange Press to manage their absentee ballots.

Fort Orange Press was also in charge of managing mail ballots in counties that faced delivery delays in Pennsylvania, Colorado and New York.

“The only plausible explanation is a breakdown in the out-of-state private vendor’s ability to deliver ballots to voters in a timely fashion in accordance with state law,” the complaint reads.  “All signs point to a systemic and widespread breakdown in Cobb County’s mail-delivery apparatus, leaving approximately 2,900 voters waiting for ballots that might never arrive in time to meet the State’s election-day deadline, if they arrive at all.”  

* The Elias Law Group (ELG) represents the plaintiff in the case. ELG Chair Marc Elias is the founder of Democracy Docket.