The supervisor of the Chatham County Elections Board resigned Monday, just six months after assuming the post and less than a month before early voting for midterm elections gets underway.
Brook Schreiner had held the $95,000-a-year post for little more than six months when she submitted her resignation at an executive session of the five-member board Monday afternoon, board member James Hall said in a Facebook post.
The board accepted her decision to step down, Hall said. She will be succeeded by her predecessor, Billy Wooten, who held the position for five years, he added.
Hall gave no reasons for Schreiner’s resignation, saying the board would issue an official statement Tuesday. But her resignation comes amid persistent worries about the security of Georgia’s election system, which has been roiled in controversy since the 2020 presidential election.
In a phone interview with The Current late Monday, Schreiner disparaged the board, saying it had “never met” with her to “let me know what their expectations were.”
Noting that she was the first woman ever to hold the post of elections supervisor, she also said her “aggressiveness” at addressing “wrongdoing” faced resistance from the board and county officials. Asked to identify examples of “wrongdoing,” she referred opaquely to voter registration issues. In Chatham County, voter registration is handled separately, by the Board of Registrars. Schreiner’s work with the Board of Elections did not include oversight of the registration process, but does include oversight of the voting and tabulation processes.
“I guess Chatham County wasn’t ready for a strong, opinionated woman because when I see wrongdoing, I’m not looking at it from a political standpoint. I’m looking at the voter. And when I told people, ‘This is not right,’ I got backlash,” she said.
Schreiner also struck a note of remorse, saying she was “sorry” for the circumstances that led to her decision to quit. “I did it to myself of being too aggressive and trying to fix what I knew was wrong. It is what it is,” she said. She said her last day would be Tuesday (Sept. 15).
Schreiner was one of three candidates interviewed by the board in its search for Wooten’s successor. She had served as director of elections and registration in Butts County for five years. Prior to that, she held the same position in Henry County for 10 years.
From the election board headquarters on Eisenhower Avenue on Savannah’s south side, Schreiner oversaw elections in a county where there are some 88 voting precincts, and the number of registered voters has soared to more than 233,000 — up from some 155,300 in 2016 and 200,300 in 2020.
Just how fraught the task of administering the office in a time when the state’s election system is under fire was evident Monday in a message on the board’s website:
“Due to delays at the State level, the Logic and Accuracy testing for Chatham County’s voting machines will not begin as planned on Monday, September 14. We will keep the public updated here and on our Facebook.”
