Overcoming the universal democratic opposition, Republicans in the Georgia Senate on Monday narrowly passed a comprehensive electoral bill that would eliminate the absent vote without excuse, promulgated by Republicans in 2005, just months after a record number of Georgians opted in. for voting this way in the 2020 presidential elections.
Four Republicans did not vote for the bill, which passed 29-20.
The legislation, SB 241, would also change the process of verifying the absent vote. Instead of using the subjective signature matching process, voters would be required to include their driver’s license or state ID card number when requesting and returning an absentee ballot. Voters without these forms of identification would have to provide a photocopy of another accepted ID, in addition to providing the last four digits of their CPF and date of birth.
Several Democrats opposed the bill and asked lawmakers to vote against it.
“SB 241 creates unnecessary barriers and overwhelms voters. It disproportionately impacts racial minorities, the elderly, those living in rural Georgia, the disabled and students,” said Democratic state senator Jen Jordan. “The motivations are really suspicious because it is introduced immediately after voters of color have dramatically increased the use of absent voting in the past year.”
Several black Democratic lawmakers said they personally offended the piece of legislation, going back to the Jim Crow era and the struggle of black Americans not only to win the right to vote, but to remove the barriers put in place to restrict it.
“It is not about the process. It is about suppressing the vote of the same group of people, especially me and people who look like me, and I take it personally. I am here in this chamber because of the Voting Rights Act” , said state senator Gail Davenport. “Some good-hearted lawmakers want to please a racist and selfish ex-leader and his followers. Well, I tell you today, don’t do that.”
The general bill was one of dozens of pieces of legislation on the state Senate’s agenda to consider on Monday, which is “Changeover Day” for the Georgia General Assembly. Bills that are not passed in one of the chambers until today are unlikely to become law in this legislative session. About a third of the bills on the Senate’s agenda for “Crossover Day” addressed electoral law.
Republican Lieutenant Governor Geoff Duncan, the president of the Senate, did not chair the body while SB 241 was being debated because he does not support the bill.
“Lieutenant Governor Duncan made it clear that he does not support the reversal of voting without an excuse for absence from Georgia, which is currently included in SB 241. He is strongly opposed to that provision,” Macy McFall, deputy chief of staff and communications for Duncan director, told ABC News.
According to the non-partisan Brennan Center for Justice, as of February 19, more than 250 bills with provisions that restrict access to voting have been presented in 43 states. The organization described these projects as “based on a series of unfounded and racist allegations of electoral fraud and electoral irregularities”.
Without evidence, former President Donald Trump said for months before and after the general election that the presidential dispute was “rigged”, specifically targeting postal voting, falsely claiming that it led to widespread fraud.
Georgia’s Democrats have labeled Republican-sponsored legislation that limits voting as “voter suppression projects,” claiming that they offer solutions to problems that do not exist and will be challenged and potentially invalidated in court.
“This account is equivalent to entering your house, seeing a sink full of dirty dishes, a lot of laundry, a lawn to mow, a refrigerator that is empty and then deciding that, instead of going to all of this, you “We go to the hardware store and start building a deck – a deck you don’t need,” said state senator Sonya Halpern. “The house is on fire and you are all building a deck.”
But Republicans argued that the goals of the projects are to reduce costs, ease the workload for county election officials, strengthen electoral security and restore faith in Georgia’s elections.
“The two and a half million voters who voted in November who are Republicans, who may have concerns … they have a right to have their voice heard in this capital,” said Republican Senator Jason Anavitarte, speaking in support of SB 241. “I’m sure, you know, I’m going to receive more tweets from LeBron James and others about how I’m suppressing votes, but at the end of the day, all votes must count in this state, and I pray about each of us as we move forward in this process … that we have found a way to ensure that all Georgians trust the process. “
Responding to Democrats’ assertion that bills are unnecessary, Senate majority leader Mike Dugan, a Republican, went section by section explaining why each provision in SB 241 was necessary and, at one point, falsely claimed that the sponsored bill “is not preventing anyone from voting by absent mail”, despite section six of the bill outlining the seven specific reasons why a voter is eligible to request a ballot by mail.
At the end of the debate, Dugan admitted that there was no widespread fraud, but said: “To say that no adjustments need to be made to resolve some of the problems that we see emerging in the state is inaccurate. need. Do it beforehand. “
The focus of Republican lawmakers on electoral law follows the state party’s blunt defeats in the 2020 electoral cycle, which the Republican Secretary of State has repeatedly defended as safe, accurate and free from mass fraud.
“A defeated president trying to overthrow his country with him by spreading lies about electoral fraud … these lies are now presented as excuses for projects we are voting on today, projects that take away voting options and make it more difficult to vote, State Senator Sally Harrell, a Democrat, said on Monday, before the bills were accepted.
She added: “But the lies can backfire … these people, when they get angry, they organize.”
The state chamber is yet to debate and vote on the bills for the elections approved by the Senate. The Chamber passed its own bill for the elections, HB 531, on March 1. This Republican-sponsored bill does not eliminate the absent vote without excuse, suggesting that there may be no votes in favor in the lower house.
However, like the Senate bill, HB 531 adds a photo ID requirement for absentee voting. The addition of a photo identification requirement for absentee voters by post is widely supported by voters in Georgia, according to a January poll conducted by the University of Georgia for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Democrats and voting rights advocates further criticized HB 531, citing the new identification requirement and other changes it would make to early and absent voting.
Gaining much of the blowback is a clause that requires uniformity in the number of voting days at the beginning of the weekend – which larger and more diverse counties took advantage of in November 2020.
Each county would have to conduct early voting from Monday to Friday during the three-week period, as well as on the second Saturday, plus an additional day – Saturday or Sunday – during the first early voting weekend. Under current law, only one Saturday of early voting is required, but counties may choose to open locations during the other three weekend days that fall in the period.
The state’s largest counties, which favor Democrats and are home to many black voters in Georgia, took advantage of this in November 2020, establishing more early polling places and offering more voting days over the weekend compared to the previous elections. This, combined with the influx of voters voting by mail, resulted in shorter waits on Election Day compared to the queues that voters in those counties saw during the June primaries and in previous elections.
When HB 531 was approved a week ago, Fair Fight Action, the voting rights organization founded by Stacey Abrams, described it as “a dangerous attempt to reverse voting rights” that “would add extra obstacles for voters of color and marginalized communities. “
After the Senate bill passed on Monday, its CEO, Lauren Groh-Wargo, issued a statement that partly warned Republicans.
“This blatantly unconstitutional legislation will not go unchallenged,” she said. “We will continue to fight in Georgia, in the courts and in Congress to ensure that the voting rights of Georgians are not infringed.”