Resignation of Chatham County elections supervisor: ‘loss of confidence’

For Brook Schreiner, the end of her stint as director of Chatham County’s elections office came quickly and without warning.

Summoned into a closed-door executive session of the county’s election board following its regularly scheduled public meeting on the afternoon of Sept. 14, Schreiner said she was offered a choice between resigning or being fired. The board gave her no reasons for its ultimatum. There was no discussion, she said. She resigned.

On Monday, the board’s chairman, Thomas Mahoney III, confirmed that Schreiner had stepped down. He refused to detail the reasons for her resignation or the circumstances leading to it, saying that it was a “personnel matter.”

But interviews with more than a dozen election officials, current and former county officials, and local lawmakers in the past two months paint a picture of an elections supervisor whose stumbles mounted almost from the start of her brief tenure.

The lapses included an ill-planned meeting with a local political organization, an overly zealous push for an overhaul of Chatham’s election system, and perhaps most damaging of all, a racially charged accusation against a local Black lawmaker.

The result was “a loss of confidence” among elections board members over time that led to a “consensus” among most of its members that Schreiner needed to go, said one board member who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the board’s internal deliberations.

There is no evidence that Schreiner’s resignation points to any technical or logistical problems in Chatham’s election system that could jeopardize an accurate tally in November. Mahoney went out of his way Monday to say the voting system in Chatham is secure and that voting in the midterms will be free and fair.

Absent evidence to the contrary, Schreiner’s story is for now a cautionary tale about an official who, in her fervor to put her stamp on that system, appears to have been tone-deaf to the county’s history and politics, a fateful error in a state whose elections system continues to be roiled in controversy, much of it partisan.

“I think the missteps she took alienated a lot of people,” said a county official who worked closely with Schreiner.

‘A bigger county’

Schreiner was the only candidate that the elections board interviewed face-to-face in its search for successor to Billy Wooten, who stepped down in January after five years in the post.

She came to Chatham from Butts County in central Georgia, where she had served as director of elections and voter registration for five years. Before that, she’d worked for a decade in Henry County’s elections office, working her way to the top job there.

Soon after assuming her post, she declared herself “happy to be back in a bigger county.” Still, the size of Chatham, compared to Butts County, meant the learning curve in her new job would be steep. Butts has five voting precincts and roughly 27,200 registered voters. Chatham’s 90 voting precincts and 233,700 registered voters.

For the new elections office supervisor, the calendar also posed a challenge.

When Schreiner took over the elections office on Feb. 2, primary elections were three-and-half months away and general elections, five-and-half months after that. Overseeing both elections was a daunting administrative and logistical challenge for the most experienced of elections supervisors, let alone a newcomer.

‘Next level’

At first, Schreiner spoke of a go-slow-get-to-know-the-place posture to her new, $95,000-a-year job.

“My approach in my first year has been to learn, evaluate and to make thoughtful improvements where needed. I just wanted to take this year to kind of learn their policies and procedures,” she told the Chatham County Republican Party at its monthly meeting on April 8.

Yet even then, nine weeks after moving into the supervisor’s office at the board’s headquarters on Eisenhower Avenue, Schreiner spoke of larger ambitions.

While Wooten, her predecessor, had done a “great job” in setting up an election staff, she was in Chatham, she told GOP gathering, to take its elections office to the “next level.”

For all her experience and technical expertise in the intricacies of the state’s voting system, however, Schreiner often appeared unaware or indifferent to how her push to take the elections office to the “next level” would be perceived at a time when almost everything related to elections in Georgia is under scrutiny, one of her earliest supporters and other officials said.

Her presentation to Chatham Republicans, advertised as closed to the media, drew protests from local Democrats, who said it gave the appearance that the elections office was partisan and one-sided. She subsequently scheduled a similar briefing to the Democratic Party of Chatham.

Her move to shutter some polling stations in the county in the name of efficiency and cost-saving ran up against fears among Black residents of the county that once again, they were being disenfranchised, one longtime county official said.

Political land mine

Of all the political landmines over which Schreiner stumbled, none was more incendiary than her push for a merger of the county’s board of elections and board of registrars.

Chatham is one of only two of Georgia’s 159 counties to maintain separate offices — one administering voter rolls, early voting and absentee ballots and the other, overseeing the elections themselves.

The idea of unifying the two offices to streamline the voting system has been bandied about for years by both Democrats and Republicans. As recently as 2021, then-state Sen. Lester Jackson, a Savannah Democrat, unsuccessfully introduced legislation to do so.

During a meeting earlier this year of the Republican-dominated State Election Board, where two cases involving voter tapes are currently pending, members wondered aloud why the two boards were still separate.

But since the controversies over the results of the 2020 presidential election have swept the state’s politics, opposition to a merger has grown, especially many Chatham Democrats, who view the current set-up as a firewall against interference by a Republican-controlled legislature and governor’s office.

‘She wouldn’t let it go’

It was into this political cauldron that Schreiner plunged.

When asked at the April 8 GOP meeting about the possibility of a merger of the county’s board of elections and board of registrars — a major overhaul of Chatham’s election system that had been discussed by local officials and lawmakers for years — she replied, “It’s a work in progress.” She went on to urge the group to lobby for it with the county commission and state lawmakers.

As she shopped the idea around the county and in Atlanta, some officials were warmer to discussing the merger than others. Some Democratic state lawmakers thought the idea was worth taking up again, possibly as soon as next year’s legislative session.

But Schreiner also encountered resistance.

In pressing for a merger, Schreiner appeared to presume that she, a relative newcomer to Chatham, would head a restructured elections apparatus in Chatham. She reached out to Democrats outside Chatham to muster support, against the advice of local Democrats, who advised her to focus on rallying local party support instead. “But she wouldn’t let it go,” a local Democrat said.

Her push aggravated tensions between the elections board and the board of registrars whose supervisor, Sabrina German, has held the job for 10 years. Just months into her new job, the two supervisors were barely on speaking terms, several elections board members and local officials said.

To those who didn’t respond favorably to her merger pitch, Schreiner seemed to lash out in frustration and less than five months into her new job, it spilled over.

‘Slanderous behavior’

In a phone call on June 23 to Chatham County Commissioner Aaron “Adot” Whitely to discuss the recently completed special session of the General Assembly, Schreiner dropped a bombshell: She’d been told, she said to Whitely, that he was calling her a “racist Republican.”

While he had openly expressed concerns about her “apparent support” for a merger, Whitely replied, he had never called her a racist, he later recalled in an email to elections board members and county officials and in an interview with The Current.

“You can ask all the racists,” he added. “I call them a racist to their face. If I thought you were that I would have told you to your face.”

Following the phone conversation, Whitely contacted the two Democratic members of the elections board. Schreiner’s allegation wasn’t a one-off, one of the members, Latricia Brown, told him. She, too, had heard Schreiner accuse Whitely of describing her as a “racist Republican.”

It was the indication that Schreiner had repeated her allegation about Whitely publicly, not simply in a phone conversation with the commissioner himself, that led him to write an email to elections board members and county officials on July 11 entitled, “Slanderous Behavior from Elections Supervisor.”

In the email, a copy of which was obtained by The Current, Whitely recounts his conversation with Schreiner and asks the board to “remind” her of the “professional standards expected of county employees and the potential legal consequences and institutional consequences of making or repeating false statements about elected officials, county personnel, or members of the public.”

He was also weighing his legal options and would consult a lawyer “as appropriate,” he told the board.

‘Too aggressive’

Schreiner’s choice to resign last week makes Whitely’s threatened lawsuit moot. It also means, among other things, that the five-member board will not be legally obliged to state publicly why, in its view, Schreiner was no longer suitable for the job of Chatham County’s elections supervisor.

From the start, the board played down her resignation. In a video posted on Facebook shortly after the board meeting concluded, longtime board member James Hall summarized a “couple highlights” of the meeting. He went on at length to offer assurances to viewers that adequate security preparations were in place in the country for midterm elections.

Only in the video’s waning seconds did Hall mention that the board had voted to “accept” Schreiner’s resignation. Further details and public statements about the move would be forthcoming, he said.

Schreiner, for her part, was both defiant and contrite in the hours after her resignation.

“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 told The Current.

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.

‘In good hands’

In the wake of Schreiner’s resignation, preparations for the start of early in-person voting for midterm elections, which starts in 22 days, are moving ahead under the direction of Wooten, Schreiner’s predecessor, who came out of retirement to take over the office.

“The voters are in good hands here in Chatham County,” assured Mahoney, the elections board chairman, praising Wooten and the county elections staff. “We’re going to have a good, smooth election.”

As for Schreiner’s fateful and controversial push for a merger of the board of elections and board of registrars, any discussion over the financial and logistical merits of following the lead of 157 other counties in Georgia is likely to be shelved for the foreseeable future, local officials interviewed for this story said.