Macon’s board of elections working to resolve district mapping errors ahead of District 5 election

Some residents in Macon-Bibb County Commission District 5 may be registered to vote in other districts, an error the Macon-Bibb County elections supervisor is working to correct ahead of the special election to fill the vacant seat of Seth Clark, who resigned in early January to run for lieutenant governor. 

The Georgia Secretary of State’s Office is looking into the matter following a complaint submitted by the chair of the Macon-Bibb County Democratic Party.

District 8 Commissioner Donice Bryant raised the issue at a January commission meeting during which the board voted to approve qualifying dates and fees for the special election in March.

Bryant, who was elected to represent parts of central and west Bibb County in 2024, said she first complained about the issue two years ago after voters in her district said that only candidates from District 5 were on their ballots. 

“I was contacted by a couple of them today,” Bryant said at the meeting Jan. 20. “They checked their voter cards and they’re still showing District 5. … What are we doing about that? Who do I need to contact about that because (Elections Supervisor Tom) Gillon says he can’t do it. So what are we doing?”

Mayor Lester Miller said he wasn’t the Board of Elections or the state department “so if someone has an issue with the board of elections that’s something they need to take up direct with them.” 

Interim County Attorney Duke Groover said the county commission has no control over the Board of Elections and is only required to set fees and dates for qualifying, which is set to take place Feb. 11-15. 

Kerry Hatcher, who is campaigning for an at-large seat on the Bibb County Board of Education, was in the crowd. He listened to Bryant and took it upon himself to look into her concerns.

“I’m a data guy,” Hatcher said. “I think this is why it’s important that government publishes data automatically, on the regular, without any impediment to accessing it. … That would solve a lot of our trust issues or uncover problems and allow us to move forward as a community to fix it.”

Hatcher told The Melody he downloaded digital maps of the districts and overlaid them with voter registration information. That voter information was obtained from someone in the Macon-Bibb County Republican party whose colleague purchases it monthly from the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office. Hatcher’s analysis showed as many as 500 voters in District 5 alone were registered in the wrong districts.

“Long story short, there’s at least a thousand people across the county who are registered in the wrong commission district,” Hatcher said. “That can cause all kinds of issues.”

The state legislature draws new district lines every decade to account for population changes. The most recent redistricting occurred in 2024. 

George Thomas Jr., who lost the 2024 election for the District 6 seat to Raymond Wilder, recalled he was unable to vote for himself in the election because he didn’t appear on his ballot. 

“They had to fix it. It was wrong,” Thomas said, adding he was “surprised” to learn some voters were still registered in the wrong districts. 

“I would have thought it was done by now,” he said.

Hatcher shared his findings with the local elections office as well as the local GOP and Democratic parties.  

Renoalda Scott, chair of the Macon-Bibb County Democratic Party, forwarded an email containing Hatcher’s findings to the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office. 

“I think that something needed to be done about it,” Scott said of the complaint she submitted that sparked a state investigation. “We should not be going into a district election with those findings.”

Hatcher said he was contacted by an investigator with the state office who wanted more details on his findings.

Messages left for Robert Sinners, director of communications for the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office, were not returned.

Amanda Prettyman, who is active in the Macon-Bibb County GOP, said the issue of election integrity is not just bipartisan but multi-partisan. She recalled that some candidates in 2024 contested the certification of the election due to voter registration errors that were only realized when some voters went to cast their ballots. 

“Really, the government has the ability to do that analysis,” Prettyman said of ensuring voter addresses correlate with the correct districts. “The average local candidate doesn’t have the money to mount an election lawsuit. … That’s why it’s so important that our local office is accurate.”

View a layout of the map below.

How districts are checked

Macon-Bibb County Elections Supervisor Tom Gillon said his office “eyeballed it with paper maps” to detect discrepancies with voter registrations until 2019 or 2020.

“Then we got GIS [Geographic Information System] software, and that simplified matters somewhat,” Gillon said, referring to the computerized version of district maps overlaid with pins marking voters’ addresses. “That helped out a lot because I can bring up maps and just overlay the different districts over any address and one-by-one figure out which” districts a voter should be in.”

Gillon said he typically checks districts against voter rolls before a major election and had already been working to verify District 5 voters were accurately registered before Scott sent the complaint to the state.

Gillon said he sometimes recruits help from an election official in Hall County, who “has software that he can compare our voter list to his GIS maps and instantly pull out any discrepancies. … Every so often I’ll hit him up and he will analyze ours and point out any things that need fixing.”

The district maps can get complicated. The county has nine county commission districts, six school districts and four water authority districts, plus state legislature and congressional districts. When there are multiple races on the ballot, a single polling place can have multiple ballot styles with different choices depending on their addresses.

“We can do it in house, but not as quickly, not as accurately,” Gillon said. “We did a lot of work in 2024 to fix the issues that we found then. Most of the changes were done after the census in 2023 and a few were changed in 2024 because of some lawsuits.”

The digital maps are organized by street segments. Gillon showed The Melody where some district lines cut straight through individual homes, prompting him to determine which district a majority of the home lies within. 

In analysing District 5 maps, Gillon said he identified nearly a dozen streets where voters were incorrectly registered to vote including: Arlington Park, Christian Avenue, Churchill Street, Columbus Road, Eveline Avenue, Lowe Street, Melrose Street, Montpelier Place, Napier Avenue, Oglesby Place and Sharon Drive. 

“Those got taken care of today,” Gillon said on Feb. 6, adding that he could not determine how many voters were impacted because his role is only “making sure each street segment is properly coded” and the state handles the rest, including sending out new voter registration cards. 

“We make the change in GARVis [Georgia Registered Voter Information System] and it gets automatically changed — sometimes instantly, sometimes overnight, depending on how we change it,” Gillon said. “We try to find everything we can, but it’s a slow process.

“We’re going to keep an eye on it periodically, elections or not,” Gillon said of ensuring voters are registered to vote in the correct districts. 

Several people have filed declarations of intent to campaign with the state, but the window for local candidate qualifying starts at noon Feb. 11 and ends at 5:30 p.m. on Feb. 15. Early voting for District 5 starts Feb. 23 and the election is slated for March 17.

To verify your voter registration information, visit the secretary of state’s “my voter page” here.