Steve Koonin said making State Farm Arena available for voting is not aimed at any political partyGETTY IMAGES
State Farm Arena re-opened to the public yesterday, and for the next 19 days, the home of the Hawks "will serve as the largest early voting site in the hotly-contested state of Georgia," according to Dan Wolken of USA TODAY. The venue "will have 302 voting machines spread across the arena floor and concourse and 60 check-in sites to service any of the nearly 800,000 registered voters in Fulton County." State Farm Arena expects to "move thousands of voters per day through the building without any long waits." A "significant part of that effort is the fact that the Hawks have essentially converted 300 employees from their staff to temporarily become election workers, including 70 poll clerks and 15 poll managers." But even though the Hawks are running the site, it "will not be a Hawks or NBA-centric experience." There "won't be any video boards showing highlights of Trae Young or a concession stand where you can buy a beer." It "will be a quiet, normal voting experience that just happens to occur in a non-traditional location." Hawks CEO Steve Koonin said, "This is efficient, effective, safe socially distanced voting taking place in a very large business being run by people who are in the large crowd business." He added, "We didn't design this for Democrats or Republicans. We designed it for everybody. There's no politics on our part, it's just vote" (USA TODAY, 10/13).
