Georgia lawmakers have proposed a measure that would significantly reduce access to voting, after a record number of voters boosted Democratic victories in the 2020 race.
The measure went from 29 to 20 in the Georgia Senate, controlled by the Republican Party, which was the absolute minimum number of votes that Republicans needed. Four Republicans, including some in competitive contests, were left out of the vote, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
The bill, SB 241, would end the right to vote by mail without having to provide an excuse, a policy that Georgia Republicans implemented in the state in 2005. More than 1.3 million people voted by mail in the general election 2020 in the state. According to the bill, only people aged 65 or over, or who have one of several excuses approved by the state, would be allowed to vote by mail. Currently, only 16 other states require voters to provide an excuse to vote by mail.
Legislation also requires voters to provide identifying information, such as driver’s license number, both when they request the vote by mail and when they return the ballot.
Republicans frequently raise the specter of electoral fraud to justify such restrictions, although there were several recounts of votes in Georgia in the 2020 race, as well as audits, and officials have not found this kind of irregularity.
Mike Dugan, the Republican state senator who sponsored the bill, said the lack of widespread fraud should not be an impediment to changing electoral rules.
“You don’t wait until you have problems with the wholesale to try to meet the need,” he said. “You do this beforehand.”
He also said at the Senate floor on Monday that the bill was necessary to reduce the burden on local election officials and to ensure that voters were not deprived of rights.
State Sen. Elena Parent, a Democrat, said the justification for the bill was an “armament of Trump’s lies” about the election.
“It is a willingness and acceptance of damage to American democracy,” she said. “The numbers to prevent this bill may not be here in this Chamber today. But I guarantee that there are many thousands of Georgians now whose political spirit has been awakened by disgust at the modern day electoral suppression. “
A torrent of Democrats criticized the measure as a veiled effort to suppress black voters and other minorities in Georgia. These groups contributed to the state’s record attendance in 2020 and helped propel Joe Biden, as well as Democratic candidates for Senator Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, to impressive victories in the state.
“I recognize racism when I see it,” said Gail Davenport, a Democrat who remembers watching the Ku Klux Klan march on Saturdays in Jonesboro, south of Atlanta. “It is not about the process. It is about suppressing the vote of a certain group of people, especially me, and people who look like me, and I take this personally. ”
The bill will now go to the Georgia House of Representatives, which last week approved its own set of voting restrictions, including new limits for early voting and deposit boxes. It is not yet clear which proposals will be sent to the governor’s table as soon as each chamber fully considers the project of the opposite chamber.
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Lawmakers have until March 31 to send the accounts to Governor Brian Kemp’s desk, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
“In the past two election cycles, we’ve seen a dramatic increase in the number of black voters who voted by mail, in the number of young people who voted in advance, in the number of African Americans who voted on Saturday and Sunday,” Stacey Abrams, the former candidate for governor of Georgia, told Mother Jones.
“We have seen unprecedented levels of participation in all sectors. And therefore, every voter access metric that has been good in Georgia is now under attack. “
Leading Republicans in the state, including Lieutenant Gov Geoff Duncan, said they opposed efforts to get rid of the vote without excuse and Duncan refused to chair the Senate on Monday as he considered the move to do just that.
At several points during the debate, which lasted about three hours on Monday afternoon, Democrats connected the policies under consideration to those in the south of Jim Crow. They noted that some members of the legislature had lived through these policies. Harold Jones II, another Democratic state senator, urged his colleagues to pay attention to black legislators who spoke out against the bill.
“It is because this most basic right has been denied us. It’s not 1800, it’s not 1850, it’s right here in this room. Many of the senators who sit here have lived through this process, ”he said. “Let me tell you, it’s not a theater. It is not a performance. It is real because we live with it every day. “