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Georgia Republicans unveiled a comprehensive new legislation that would make it dramatically more difficult to vote in the state after an election with record turnout and growing participation among black voters.
The move is one of the most blatant efforts to hinder voting in the United States in recent years. The bill would prevent officials from offering early voting on Sundays, a day traditionally used by black churches to mobilize voters as part of a “souls at the ballot box” effort. This would impose new limits on the use of vote collection boxes, restrict who can handle an absent ballot, and require voters to provide their driver’s license number or a copy of another ID along with their postal vote request. It would also require voters to provide the same information from the driver’s license on the ballot itself or the last four digits of their social security number if they do not have an acceptable identity document.
The bill gives voters less time to request and return ballots in the mail, not only increasing the deadline for returning an entry, but also limiting requests to start 78 days before an election instead of the current 180. It requires election officials reject ballots mistakenly cast in the wrong constituency and prohibit organizers from offering food or water to voters who line up to vote.
“With extreme precision, the project targets voters of color,” said Nse Ufot, head of the New Georgia Project, one of the groups that mobilized black voters in Georgia. “Georgia Republicans have seen what happens when black voters gain power and appear at the polls, and are now making a joint effort to suppress the votes and voices of black Georgians.”
Helen Butler, executive director of the Georgia Coalition for the People’s Agenda, one of the groups that helped mobilize black voters last year, said there was no justification for the project. One of the ways in which Butler’s group helped voters before the election was by helping them return their absent voting forms to election officials. The Republican proposal would prohibit this.
“There is no other reason for this than this ideology and this misinformation that there was fraud. There was no fraud in the election. Governor, everyone said there was no fraud, ”she said in an interview.
At a hearing on Thursday, Barry Fleming, the project’s sponsor, said the changes to the early vote were an attempt to create uniformity across the state. He said the effort to shorten the voting time in the mail was an attempt to get him to override personal voting.
The effort to shorten postal voting comes after many voters saw major delays in obtaining their ballots by mail due to delays at the United States Post Office and overworked polling stations. About a third of the initial votes in the state were from black voters and Joe Biden overwhelmingly won the postal vote in Georgia.
“His newfound problem with early voting is simple: many black Georgians used it and the Republicans were humiliated,” said Seth Bringman, spokesman for Fair Fight action, a civic action group led by former Democratic candidate Stacey Abrams to the government.
“Instead of listening to the wishes of conspiracy theorists and insurrectionists, he should listen to the thousands of voters from both parties in his district.”
Republicans promised changes in Georgia after Joe Biden narrowly won the state in November and Jon Ossoff and Rev. Raphael Warnock, both Democrats, won impressive surprises over Republican candidates in November.
State officials, including Republicans, have said repeatedly that there was no evidence of election fraud, but Republicans have pledged to impose new restrictions anyway.
A separate bill under consideration in the state senate would eliminate absent voting without excuse, something Republicans made into law in 2005, allowing people to vote by post only if they were 75 or older or had an excuse.
Republicans made the bill public just over an hour before a hearing, giving the public and lawmakers little time to review what was in it. More than two dozen groups wrote to Fleming on Thursday, asking him to stop considering the measure.
“It contains a set of proposals that would have devastating consequences for voting rights in Georgia,” they wrote. “It is absolutely unacceptable that legislators, defenders of the right to vote and the people of Georgia have been surprised by this statement.”
The Georgia effort comes amid a national effort, led by Republicans, to enact a wave of new voting restrictions after the 2020 elections. There are at least 165 pending bills in 33 states that would make voting difficult, according to an analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice.
“You lost your right! So now they are trying to change the rules and make it more difficult to vote, ”said Deborah Scott, executive director of Georgia Stand-Up, another group that worked to mobilize black voters, via email. “It is a pity that in 2021 blacks and browns in Georgia have to continue to fight for our citizenship rights.”