Civil rights groups sue Gwinnett County over more than 1,800 undelivered mail ballots

In a complaint filed Friday on behalf of a voter, the ACLU of Georgia, the Legal Defense Fund and the Southern Poverty Law Center said that more than 1,800 voters in Gwinnett County still have not received their absentee ballots. A Gwinnett County voter sued on behalf of himself and 1,819 other voters who applied for absentee ballots on or after Oct. 6. Nearly 10,000 voters across three of Georgia’s most populous counties have experienced absentee ballot delays, the civil rights organizations said in the lawsuit.

A similar lawsuit against Cobb County attributed the delays to a New York-based print company called Fort Orange Press, which is also contracted to manage Gwinnett and DeKalb counties’ mail ballots. Cobb County has since agreed to overnight ballots to the affected voters. Fort Orange Press is also the vendor for several other counties in Colorado, Pennsylvania and New York that have complained about voters not receiving ballots, Democracy Docket reports. Fort Orange Press has not yet responded to Democracy Docket’s request for comment.

Update (2026-10-08, Bradford County vote date; accounts gathered 2026-10-31): Officials’ own accounts of the vendor delays, and a limit on the Colorado reference

Cobb County says the delay appears to have been caused by the county’s absentee ballot vendor, Fort Orange Press, and is primarily affecting voters whose ballots were issued between October 7, 2026 and October 15, 2026. In Pennsylvania, an issue delayed the mailing of more than 3,000 mail-in ballot packets to Bradford County voters, and its commissioners voted unanimously on Oct. 8 to issue a subpoena to Fort Orange Press to determine how, and why, this delay occurred. In Monroe County, N.Y., Republican Commissioner Peter Elder said, “The vendor had, believe it or not, an envelope issue which did slow down the ballots as they went out.” Spectrum News identifies that vendor as Fort Orange Press, which it says it was still waiting to hear back from. The Colorado problems found in this check were from 2024 and different in kind: KRDO reported then that ballots from Fort Orange Press in Las Animas, Huerfano and Moffat counties were unscannable.