Proponents of voting rights in Georgia are concerned that Republicans are recovering the progress made with much effort in the state, after a record turnout among voters in the November general election and in the Senate’s second rounds earlier this year.
A new batch of bills pending in the Georgia legislature is raising red flags among voting rights groups that say the state would not have seen the record turnout it saw in the latest disputes if the bills were in place.
“I don’t know if 5 million people would be successful in voting if the rules were some of the things they are proposing today,” said Andrea Young, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia.
Electoral projects submitted by Republicans of Georgia in recent weeks include legislation that aims to end voting without excuse and automatic voter registration, limit early voting on weekends and the amount of time voters would have to request absentee ballots, and demand more identification to vote absent.
Nsé Ufot, founder of the Super PAC Novo Sul, said if any of the electoral bills including such restrictions were a factor in November, when Joe Biden
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“If any of these bills were in the books in November, they would have eliminated the margin that we saw and that is essentially what they were trying to do,” said Ufot, CEO of the New Georgia Project, a non-partisan group that registered more than 50,000 Georgians to vote last year.
In January, almost 4.5 million votes were cast in Georgia’s top qualifiers in the United States, in which Warnock and Ossoff secured minimal victories over the then Sens. Kelly Loeffler
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The Democratic victories, which transferred control of the upper house in the United States Congress to that party, came just months after the state turned blue to a presidential candidate for the first time since 1992 in a general election that had more than 5 million votes launched, defining another high watermark for total participation. That same election also set a new record for the number of absentee votes.
Republicans in the state claimed that the proposed voting measures are aimed at increasing electoral security and public confidence in the Georgia elections after Trump made baseless allegations about widespread electoral fraud when he tried to overturn the presidential election results.
“There is no proven vote theft,” Derrick Johnson, CEO and president of NAACP, told The Hill. “The only thing we saw is more active, diverse and engaged electoral participation from many communities”.
Johnson said conservatives “decided to look for measures to reduce voters’ ability to participate” when they should “expand their agenda to be more inclusive”.
While Democrats have criticized Republican-backed projects in Georgia as a response to their party’s victories in the runoff and presidential elections, some also wonder whether the projects could harm Republicans’ chances in the state, making it more difficult for their supporters themselves vote.
“The interesting thing about voter suppression is that it is a kind of chemotherapy. It’s thinking that you’re going to kill more cells you don’t want than you want … and that’s the bet they’re making, ”said Young.
“From our point of view, it is wrong because it makes it more difficult for citizens of Georgia to vote because all of these measures are aimed at eligible voters in Georgia,” she added.
State Senator Larry Walker, sponsor of some of the voting bills in Georgia, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution last month that “the purpose of this proposal is not to hinder legal voting, but to make it more difficult to vote illegally.”
This reasoning does not convince the majority of defenders of voting rights.
“We really need to stop pretending that there is something that can be redeemed on any of these accounts,” said Ufot, adding that she thinks the accounts “are all designed” to create obstacles to voting for “people who want to access the franchise and who wish to participate in our elections. “
The New Georgia Project is being investigated by the Republican State Secretary of Georgia for his methods of helping to register some of these voters in an investigation that Ufot called “partisan and racist”.
“What are they responding to [with these bills] it is a historic election, where people who have historically been disenfranchised or discouraged from participating in our elections because they thought their vote did not count, participated and participated in large numbers this year, ”said Ufot.
According to data released by the Pew Research Center last december, more than 520,000 new voters have registered in the state since 2016. The survey revealed significant gains made by registered Latin voters, a group that grew at almost the same rate as its white counterparts in the four-year period, despite having been dwarfed by white voters registered, 260,000 to 3.8 million, in 2016. Asian registered voters, a group that totaled 188,000 in October 2020, also grew by 63,000 in the same period, according to the center.
Black voters saw the biggest increase in registration compared to other racial groups, the center said. With an increase of almost 130,000 people added to the electoral roll between October 2016 and October 2020, the group accounted for about a quarter of the increase in new registered voters seen in the state over the four-year period.
Democrats, including Ossoff, credited the strong participation of the electoral bloc, which outbound survey data from CNN showed that the majority voted blue in the November general elections and the second round of January, as crucial to helping increase the party’s chances in Georgia.
Johnson of NAACP told The Hill that there is “a new energy to adopt known vote suppression tactics to limit access to voting” in the country as a result of the Republican Party’s loss of two US Senate seats in Georgia and Trump’s defeat in November.
“A lot of what has happened is perhaps the most aggressive voter suppression initiative we’ve seen across the country since the 1950s,” he added.
As of February 19, more than 250 bills including clauses that restrict voter access are under consideration in 43 states, according to the Brennan Center’s State Voting Bills Tracker. Of these projects, more than a dozen, all supported by Republicans, were presented only at the Georgia General Assembly.
Among the proposals, Ufot questioned a device included in measures such as Bill 531, which recently passed the state chamber in a party line vote, which would limit early voting on Sunday, a day that black churches in the state previously used to increase voter participation among the faithful with “Souls for Research” efforts.
Bishop Reginald Thomas Jackson, president prelate of the Sixth Episcopal District of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, which includes more than 500 churches in Peach State, issued a ferocious rebuke at the end of last month, calling it “another attempt to suppress the Blacks vote. “
“We use ‘Souls to the Polls’ as a means especially to get our elders and other members of our congregations to vote, get together for worship and, after worship, go to the polls to vote,” said Jackson.
Another provision of the bill that proposes photo identification requirements for absent voting also drew resistance from the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc. and the Southern Poverty Law Center, which noted the “disparate impact” the practice has had on “historically groups marginalized “in submitted testimony for a state council panel last month.
The groups said that the bill’s proponents did not provide sufficient evidence to support “vague claims that postal voting procedures in Georgia are not secure”.
Young, Johnson and Ufot agreed that the recent wave of electoral projects in Georgia are raising bets on Congress to approve comprehensive voting measures, such as the For The People Act, which the Democratic-led United States House has widely voted over. of the party lines to approve earlier this week, and the John Lewis
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In addition to expanding vote by mail and adding election day to the government’s list of federal holidays, the For The People Act, also known as HR 1., would give the Justice Department more power to enforce voting rights.
The legislation is named after Lewis, a civil rights icon and former Georgia congressman who died at the age of 80. last year, would also require states that have had repeated violations of voting rights in recent history to receive federal approval for voting changes, restoring a significant provision of the Voting Rights Act rejected by the Supreme Court in 2013.
The legislation was introduced by Democrats in 2019 and passed that year in the Chamber. The Senate has yet to vote on the measure.
Georgia is among the states that must undergo pre-authorization for changes to voting if legislation is enacted.