About 2,900 voters in Cobb County, Georgia, asked for absentee ballots, were recorded by the state as having been sent one, and still have nothing in their mailboxes — with Election Day now days away. That is the allegation at the centre of an emergency lawsuit filed on Tuesday, October 27, in the Superior Court of Cobb County, captioned Olaribigbe v. Phillips, against the county's election board.
Source: Democracy Docket
The plaintiff, a Cobb County voter suing on behalf of himself and the full affected group, asks the court to order the board to send the missing ballots by overnight express mail, with overnight return envelopes, so that voters can still meet Georgia's hard deadline: a mail ballot must reach the county by 7 p.m. on Election Day, Tuesday, November 3. Without that step, the complaint argues, voters who followed every rule would be disenfranchised through no fault of their own.
Democracy Docket, the voting-rights news outlet founded by Marc Elias — whose firm, Elias Law Group, represents the plaintiff — reported late Tuesday that a judge had granted the emergency request and ordered the county to express-mail the ballots. Its case tracker for the Georgia Mail Ballot Delays Challenge records the complaint and an emergency motion for a temporary restraining order as filed on October 27. Independent confirmations of the reported order were still limited on Wednesday, so the express-mail step should be read as reported by the plaintiff side's outlet and recorded here with that attribution.
How the delay happened, according to the complaint
The complaint blames the county's decision to hire an outside vendor: the election board engaged Fort Orange Press, a New York-based printing and mailing company, to manage Cobb County's absentee ballots. According to the filing, the delays affect ballots applied for since October 6, when the early-voting period began. Georgia law requires that during early voting, ballots be issued to applicants within three days. Yet voters who applied between October 6 and October 15 still had not received their ballots, the lawsuit says, even though the state's voter website showed those ballots as issued.
The human cost shows up in the return numbers the complaint cites: Cobb County's rate of returned absentee ballots is about 13 percent, against roughly 50 percent statewide — a gap the filing attributes directly to ballots that never landed in voters' hands. '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.
Why Cobb County matters far beyond one county
Cobb County is one of Georgia's most closely watched counties — a large metro Atlanta county and a major Democratic stronghold where, Democracy Docket notes, 57 percent of voters supported Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024. Georgia also hosts a pivotal United States Senate race this year, so a failure touching nearly 3,000 ballots in a single county, one week before Election Day, lands in the middle of a statewide contest that could be decided by far smaller margins. That is why a county mailing contract has become a court case with national attention within a day of filing.
Cobb County has published guidance for voters who have not received an absentee ballot, setting out their options before the November 3 deadline. The safest course for an affected voter is to check the ballot's status, follow the county's published options, and, if voting in person instead, follow the county's instructions for voters with an outstanding absentee request — rather than simply waiting for the mail.
What happens next
The immediate test is logistical: whether replacement ballots can be printed, express-mailed, marked and returned to the county by 7 p.m. on November 3. Beyond that deadline, the case continues in Cobb County Superior Court, where the board will have to answer the allegation that it broke Georgia's three-day issuance rule and the state constitution. No detailed public response from the board had been recorded in the reports available on Wednesday.
For Georgia's large shift-working communities — including the Punjabi diaspora families of metro Atlanta and the long-haul truck drivers who are on the road on Election Day — mail ballots are often the only practical way to vote. A breakdown in that single channel is therefore not a paperwork story. It is the difference between a vote counted and a vote never cast, and it is why this desk will follow the county's mailing and the court's orders through November 3.