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CHATHAM COUNTY, Ga. () – On Monday afternoon, the Chatham County Board of Elections held a regularly scheduled meeting, videos of which have now gone viral across multiple social media platforms, after officers carried a woman speaking at the meeting out by her hands and feet.
In the video, Beth Majeroni, 1 of 15 people at the meeting who made public comments to the board, begins her 3 minutes at the podium discussing feelings of distrust in Chatham County’s voting machines, calling for them to be replaced with paper ballots.
You can see the board’s chairman, Thomas Mahoney III, calling for order and for Majeroni to stop. She ignores Mahoney’s request and continues speaking.
That’s when Mahoney calls for officers to remove her from the meeting. She says the experience was demeaning.
“Very demeaning for a lady in a skirt to be hauled out the way I was hauled out. Very demeaning to be hauled out period,” says Majeroni.
She says she doesn’t think she did anything wrong.
“It was the worst thing; I still get traumatized looking at the videos. At the time it was surreal because I’m like ‘This can’t really be happening.’ If I had done something wrong, I think that would have been extreme, I didn’t even do anything wrong. It totally caught me off guard, I’m like wait a minute, I can’t even finish my speech?”
Chairman Mahoney tells News 3 that the board has limited time to accomplish their agendas at these monthly meetings and the comments were repetitive.
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“This is our meeting and it’s only one hour, basically about an hour that we get every month. That’s the only time we have to come together as a board to make decisions, consider things, vote,” he says.
Mahoney says they need to maintain a sense of control.
“It was very unfortunate, she dropped to the ground. She basically forced police officers to have to carry her away, which was terrible. We did allow public comment, but if someone can’t comply, then we can’t allow them to take over our meeting,”
For Majeroni, she doesn’t want to see something like this happen to other people.
“My civil right was violated and also I was harassed and manhandled and demeaned. So, I have talked to some lawyers. Something needs to be done so this doesn’t happen to anyone else,” she says.
Chairman Mahoney says the board has more availability to hear public comments at their offices or over the phone. News 3 will continue to follow this story.
Watch the full video here:
