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Tag: georgia election laws
While Advocates Seek Election Reform, Republicans Busily Restrict Voting

While Advocates Seek Election Reform, Republicans Busily Restrict Voting

The failure of major federal voting rights legislation in the Senate has left civil rights advocates saying they are determined to keep fighting—including by suing in battleground states. But the little bipartisan consensus that exists on election reform would, at best, lead to much narrower legislation that is unlikely to address state-level GOP efforts now targeting Democratic blocs.

“This is the loss of a battle, but it is not necessarily the loss of a war, and this war will go on,” Eric Holder, the former U.S. attorney general and Democrat, told MSNBC, saying that he and the Democratic Party will be suing in states where state constitutions protect voting rights. “This fight for voting rights and voter protection and for our democracy will continue.”

“The stakes are too important to give up now,” said Damon Hewitt, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which for years has operated an Election Day hotline to help people vote. “Our country cannot claim to be free while allowing states to legislate away that freedom at will.”

In recent weeks, as it became clear that the Senate was not going to change its rules to allow the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act to pass with a simple majority, there have been efforts by some lawmakers, election policy experts, and civil rights advocates to identify what election reforms could pass the Senate.

“There are several areas… where I think there could be bipartisan consensus,” said David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, in a briefing on January 20. “These areas are all around those guardrails of democracy. They are all about ensuring that however the voters speak that their voice is heard… and cannot be subverted by anyone in the post-election process.”

Becker cited updating the 1887 Electoral Count Act, which addressed the process where state-based slates of presidential electors are accepted by Congress. (In recent weeks, new evidence has surfaced showing that Donald Trump’s supporters tried to present Congress with forged certificates as part of an effort to disrupt ratifying the results on January 6, 2021.) Updating that law could also include clarifying which state officials have final authority in elections and setting out clear timetables for challenging election results in federal court after Election Day.

Five centrist Washington-based think tanks issued a report on January 20, Prioritizing Achievable Federal Election Reform, which suggested federal legislation could codify practices now used by nearly three-quarters of the states. Those include requiring voters to present ID, offering at least a week of early voting, allowing all voters to request a mailed-out ballot, and allowing states to start processing returned absentee ballots a week before Election Day.

But the report, which heavily drew on a task force of 29 state and local election officials from 20 states convened by Washington’s Bipartisan Policy Center, was notable in what it did not include, such as restoring the major enforcement section of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which was removed by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2013. It did not mention the Electoral Count Act nor growing threats to election officials from Trump supporters.

“This won’t satisfy all supporters of the Freedom to Vote Act, but this is a plausible & serious package of reforms to make elections more accessible and secure that could attract bipartisan support,” tweeted Charles Stewart III, a political scientist and director of the MIT Election Data and Science Lab. “A good starting point.”

The reason the centrist recommendations won’t satisfy civil rights advocates is that many of the most troubling developments since the 2020 election would likely remain.

Targeting Battleground States

Seasoned advocates in battleground states say that Republicans have been pursuing a bottom-up strategy of targeting key decision points in the voting process that, collectively, could end up suppressing more votes than the winning margins in recent highest-stakes contests.

They point to new laws and policies in Georgia, Florida, Wisconsin, and Texas, where the GOP has foreclosed early voting options, imposed new rationales to disqualify voters or cancel their ballots, and, in Georgia, has purged longtime Democratic county election officials. They also are concerned about new legislation that may be introduced in early 2022.

Georgia, whose 2020 elections were key to Donald Trump’s defeat and the return of the U.S. Senate’s Democratic majority, offers many examples. (The state received a 100 percent grade in the Prioritizing Achievable Federal Election Reform report, meaning it already complies with the suggested remedies.)

Beyond launching a state investigation of metro Atlanta’s Fulton County, which is seen as a precursor to a GOP-led takeover of its operations, pro-Trump Republicans’ partisan actions in Georgia also include a handful of smaller counties that have seen Democratic officials purged, polling place closures, and Sunday voting suspended, and more ballots disqualified during 2021’s municipal elections than in 2020’s presidential election.

“There’s a clear a pattern going on where they [pro-Trump Republicans] are burrowing into these counties,” said Ray McClendon, Atlanta NAACP political action chairman. “These [county] election boards are going to be hardened targets that you won’t be able to make heads or tails of how much they have rigged the system pro-Republican and anti-Democrat.”

“They’re going to tell you, ‘We’re just following the rules. There’s no requirement that we have Sunday voting. There’s no requirement that we have more than one polling place,’” said McClendon. “This is not a top-down strategy.”

News reports from local, regional, and national media confirm the overall pattern.

In rural Lincoln County, Georgia, county commissioners announced they would only stand up one polling place for 2022’s elections instead of seven. “We are not trying to suppress any votes; we’re trying to make it better,” Walker Norman, Lincoln County Commission chairman, told the local NBC TV affiliate. “If I thought it was suppressing anybody’s vote, I’ll be the first one with opposition to it.”

In Spalding County, south of Atlanta, several election commissioners in mid-2020—Black women and Democrats—were ousted under new authority given to local judges and county officials under SB 202, the GOP-led legislature’s response to the 2020 election. The new election board, led by Republicans, did not offer Sunday voting during 2021’s elections.

A Reuters investigative report found that Spalding’s Board of Elections (BOE) was among six county BOEs that had seen purges of Black Democrats under SB 202, which the federal Department of Justice has sought to overturn in a voting rights lawsuit filed in June 2021.

The six counties cited by Reuters—Lincoln, Troup, Morgan, Stephens, Pickens, and Spalding—supported Trump by large margins in 2020. But, collectively, the counties had more than 33,000 Biden votes, which was about three times Biden’s statewide victory margin over Trump. In contrast, in Fulton County, Biden beat Trump by more than 240,000 votes.

Similarly restrictive moves can be seen in Texas, said Andrea Miller, who heads the Center for Common Ground, which seeks to assist minority voters in Southern states.

“We’re currently dealing with the aftermath of the [2021] legislative changes in Texas,” she said, citing new rules over applying for a mailed-out ballot that have led to abnormally high rejection rates for the upcoming March 2022 primary elections.

“About 40 percent of the ballots are being rejected (which is a lot for Texas) and it is also taking nearly 30 days to get a ballot,” Miller said via email. “Seems Texas changed the length of your driver’s license number so if you have an old one, it doesn’t have nearly enough numbers and they ‘can’t find you in the system.’ The new law also requires that if you drop the ballot off, you must do so in person and you can only drop off your own ballot.”

Texas has also run out of voter registration forms, which the Texas secretary of state’s office has blamed on supply chain issues. (In his media briefing, Becker said that rejected absentee ballot applications were a failure by the state to educate the public, and the registration form shortage represented a failure to plan for implementing a new law.)

2022 State Legislation

Meanwhile, as 2022 begins, more legislation is looming. In Georgia, GOP legislators have introduced several bills to continue to foreclose voting options. One bill, sponsored by a state senator running for lieutenant governor, would prohibit the use of drop boxes to return mailed-out absentee ballots, which were a convenience during 2020’s COVID-19 outbreaks and alleviated polling place congestion on Election Day. In another battleground state, Wisconsin, a county judge ruled in mid-January that the ballot drop boxes were not properly authorized under state law in a lawsuit filed by a right-wing foundation. The state agency that approved their use in 2020 has been attacked by GOP lawmakers and is targeted in new legislation, Becker said.

Seen from the ground up, the purpose of the post-2020 legislation and related litigation is to allow newly empowered local Republicans to chip away at Democratic turnout, and, subsequently, to try to disqualify as many mailed-in ballots as possible, the NAACP’s McClendon said.

“They have become smart enough to know that they can’t justify just blocking people of color from voting,” McClendon said. “If they can just peel off a half a point from no Sunday voting, a quarter of a point from provisional ballots getting thrown out, another quarter of a point from people not properly filling out their ballot return envelope, they will get their numbers.”

This article was produced by Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Steven Rosenfeld is the editor and chief correspondent of Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He has reported for National Public Radio, Marketplace, and Christian Science Monitor Radio, as well as a wide range of progressive publications including Salon, AlterNet, The American Prospect, and many others.

Georgia Republicans Move To Control Elections In State's Biggest Democratic County

Georgia Republicans Move To Control Elections In State's Biggest Democratic County

ATLANTA — Georgia Republican lawmakers took a key step Friday in a long and untested process that could trigger an extraordinary takeover of the elections system of one of the state’s biggest Democratic strongholds. State Rep. Jan Jones and four other House Republican legislators sent a letter Friday demanding a review of Fulton County’s election management, a critical step in Georgia’s new voting law that must take place before the State Election Board can overhaul a county’s election board. It’s a monthslong process full of legal questions and procedural challenges, but state Republicans hav...

As Delta And Coke Officials Protest, Kemp Lies About New Election Law

As Delta And Coke Officials Protest, Kemp Lies About New Election Law

Reprinted with permission from American Independent

Following days of backlash, Republican officials are lying about what Georgia's recently passed voter suppression law will actually do, in an apparent effort to make it seem less harsh and discriminatory.

The attempt to sugarcoat the law comes as major companies, responsible for billions of dollars of Georgia's economy, are coming out against it.

Delta Air Lines, the No. 1 private employer of Georgians, came out with a statement on Wednesday calling the Georgia law "unacceptable" and built on a "lie" that there was voter fraud in the 2020 election.

Coca-Cola CEO James Quincey went on CNBC to also call the law "unacceptable" and a "step backwards" later in the day.

"This legislation is wrong and needs to be remedied, and we will continue to advocate for it both in private and in now even more clearly in public," Quincey said.

Like Delta, Coca-Cola is also headquartered in Georgia and employs thousands of people in the state.

As the backlash mounts, Republicans, including Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, who signed the voter suppression measure into law last week, are lying about what the legislation does.

In response to Delta's statement, Kemp wrote a statement saying, "Throughout the legislative process, we spoke directly with Delta representatives numerous times. ... At no point did Delta share any opposition to expanding early voting, strengthening voter ID measures, increasing the use of secure drop boxes statewide, and making it easier for local election officials to administer elections — which is exactly what this bill does," according to NPR reporter Stephen Fowler.

However, the Georgia law does not expand ballot drop boxes, as Kemp said. In fact, it does the opposite in Democratic counties.

That's because while the law mandates that counties have at least one drop box, it also puts limits on how many ballot drop boxes are allowed per county — or "one drop box for every 100,000 active registered voters," according to the law.

That would mean many Democratic-run counties that had numerous drop boxes in 2020 election would see the number of drop boxes severely cut back.

As the Savannah Morning Newsreported, "For Chatham County, which had a little over 208,000 registered voters in the Jan. 6 runoff, that likely means we'll have two drop boxes, down from the 10 we had during the runoff and the general election."

Chatham County voted overwhelmingly Democratic in the presidential election, with President Joe Biden beating Donald Trump there by a whopping 19 points.

Kemp also claimed the fact that the law lets the Republican-controlled State Board of Elections take over county election boards in Democratic strongholds was a move that makes it "easier for local election officials to administer elections."

Rather, voting rights experts fear that allowing Republicans to take over county election boards in Democratic areas or heavily Black cities that overwhelmingly support Democrats. Trump and other Republicans across the country sought to overturn the results in Democratic-controlled cities and counties in 2020 as they spread lies about voter fraud.

In a call in which Trump tried to coerce Georgia's Republican secretary of state to "find" just the right number of vote to declare him the winner of the state, Trump lied about fraud in Fulton County, the Democratic stronghold that includes the city of Atlanta. Biden carried Fulton County by a 46-point margin in 2020.

"I think the provision for state takeover of local election processes is a natural choice for a party whose election policy is driven by Trump's 'big lie'" Georgia Democratic state Rep. Josh McLaurin toldVox. "By centralizing control over those processes, Republicans make their own manipulation easier while also removing a principal barrier to their lies."

Meanwhile, the chair of Heritage Action, a right-wing organization involved in pushing voter suppression laws across the country, told similar lies and half truths about what Georgia's law does, including the dropbox lie and the sugarcoated explanation of county election board takeovers.

The Georgia law is just one of hundreds of voter suppression laws state Republican lawmakers have been pushing in response to Trump's loss.

Democrats are trying to counteract it with the For the People Act, a pro-democracy bill that would make it easier to vote and prevent almost all of these laws from being enforceable.

Polls show the act is popular, with a survey from mid-March finding 83 percent of voters support the legislation. The legislation would require states to have automatic voter registration, expand access to absentee ballots, and restrict the use of voter ID for absentee voting, among other features.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.

Georgia Election Law Is A Civil Rights Issue, Not A Partisan Quarrel

Georgia Election Law Is A Civil Rights Issue, Not A Partisan Quarrel

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters

Georgia Gov. Brain Kemp signed a Republican-backed election bill into law on Thursday that contains sweeping changes to the state's elections that already have voting rights advocates filing a legal challenge. These changes include introduction of new voter-ID requirements for absentee ballots, limitations on the use of ballot drop boxes, and more legislative control over the elections. And in a bad indication of the environment, state lawmaker Park Cannon, who is Black, was arrested and hauled into a police car after knocking on Kemp's door during the bill signing.

In the 2020 election, Joe Biden became the first Democrat to win Georgia in a presidential election since 1992. And then in January, Democratic candidates Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff swept the state's two Senate seats, taking the majority control of the U.S. Senate from the GOP. After an election season with historically high turnout across the country and Democratic wins heavily driven by Black voters support, Republicans in Georgia and across the country have now embarked on a coordinated effort to restrict access to voting.

But for some in the media, the issue of voting rights is just another political game between the parties, rather than an important struggle for constitutional rights.

Earlier on Thursday, for example, National Journal tweeted out an article that played the both-sides maneuver against coverage of congressional Democrats H.R. 1 bill, which passed the House on March 3 and is meant to protect voting rights, and Republican efforts to make voting more difficult.

Georgia Isn't Just An "Overheated" Political Play

Simply put, whether people can or cannot vote should not be viewed as equivalent positions in the course of political debate.

Politico, for example, had an item in Friday morning's Playbook highlighting Thursday's events in Georgia with the title, "Your Move, Democrats."

YOUR MOVE, DEMOCRATS — "Sweeping changes to Georgia elections signed into law," Atlanta Journal-Constitution: "Gov. Brian Kemp quickly signed a vast rewrite of Georgia's election rules into law Thursday, imposing voter ID requirements, limiting drop boxes and allowing state takeovers of local elections after last year's close presidential race. Kemp finalized the bill just over an hour after it cleared the General Assembly, leaving no doubt about its fate amid public pressure against voting restrictions.
"Protesters outside the Capitol said the bill would disenfranchise voters, calling it 'Jim Crow 2.0.' State Rep. Park Cannon, D-Atlanta, was arrested by state Troopers after knocking on Kemp's office door to try to witness the bill signing. He briefly interrupted his prepared remarks as Cannon was forcibly removed from the building by officers."

National Journal's Josh Kraushaar also tweeted that the Democrats' "overheated" allegations of voter suppression might just spur on greater voter mobilization.

Kraushaar then remarked that "raising the flag of voter suppression is one of the more effective ways to turn out your base." He quickly attracted some critical responses:

Kraushaar also claimed that the bill "doesn't do nearly as much as advertised,"overlooking the political atmosphere in which far more extreme proposals have circulated and were changed only after vigorous public protest. Republican lawmakers unsuccessfully tried to abolish no-excuse absentee voting — available since 2005 and used heavily by Democratic voters in 2020 — and tried to curtail early voting on Sundays, which has traditionally been used by Black church leaders to mobilize voters. (Kraushaar simply noted that "Souls to the Polls remains in Georgia," without any acknowledgement of just how hard people had worked on the ground to keep it.)

The fact that a less extreme bill passed is not simply a non-story if it followed weeks of controversy and efforts to prevent something even worse.

Georgia Law Exists Because Black Voters Propelled Democratic Victories

Kemp said after signing the bill: "There's no doubt there were many alarming issues with how the election was handled, and those problems, understandably, led to a crisis of confidence in the ballot box here in Georgia."

Of course, this "crisis of confidence" about the 2020 election result exists because it was stirred up by Fox News, other right-wing media, and Republican politicians and activists pushing the Big Lie advanced by former President Donald Trump that the election was stolen from him. Most notoriously in Georgia's case, Trump threatened Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, with prosecution if he did not help to reverse Biden's victory in the state.

And now, this new law strips the secretary of state of their position as the chair of the state board of elections. Instead, a majority of the board will now be appointed by the legislature, and the board will have the ability to suspend and replace local county elections officials.

Georgia Public Broadcasting notes that the law caps the number of counties where the state board could replace the local officials at four. This number may be enough to take control of the counties with larger populations where both Joe Biden and the new Democratic senators carried their victories with overwhelming margins in the Atlanta metro area.

And perhaps most notoriously, the new law makes it a crime to give food or waterto voters waiting in lines. The important context here is that voters in Georgia, especially in minority communities, had to wait in line for up to 11 hours to vote last year. Academic studies have also shown that "relative to entirely-white neighborhoods, residents of entirely-black neighborhoods waited 29 percent longer to vote and were 74 percent more likely to spend more than 30 minutes at their polling place."

Simply put, urban areas with large minority populations are routinely not given enough resources and polling places, thus causing them to have to wait in line for much longer in order to vote. Though the new law does take some steps to correct this longstanding problem, a person might be suspicious at why delivering any basic rations to people in long lines that might still exist would also be forbidden.

And that particular provision has people calling for more civil disobedience in the 2022 elections — which could potentially result in yet more arrests.