‘There were things I didn’t like’

Less than a week after Georgia Republicans passed a controversial new election law, one of the state’s top GOP leaders expressed concern about parts of the bill that he said did not have no meaning.

“There were things I didn’t like about the law at the start of the process and I spoke very loudly about it,” Georgia Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan told Yahoo News. “I think an important part of this is continuing to live around the mantra of making voting in Georgia easier to vote and harder to cheat.”

As lieutenant governor, Duncan presides over the State Senate and casts decisive votes. With the measure passed in the Legislature on a party line vote, however, this was not necessary. Yet Duncan challenges some of the provisions of the new law.

“I didn’t think it made sense for us to cancel the postal vote without an excuse,” Duncan said. “I was under the impression that the early drafts of the bill also limited the Sunday vote. I didn’t think that was a very good position to take.

“I [also] didn’t think it necessarily made sense [to not allow] water and food online, ”he added. “I think there were just better ways to do it.”

After a record 5 million votes cast in Georgia’s 2020 election cycle, Duncan said he hoped for an even higher turnout in 2024, which critics of Georgia’s new law say it was. designed to prevent. Duncan also adds that Republicans in his state need to regain their credibility by admitting that former President Trump lost in 2020 “fair and square.”

“I think the best place for Republicans to start in any sort of conversation about electoral reform is to start by saying that former President Donald Trump has lost the right to vote,” he said. “Now let’s have a conversation about how to modernize and refresh the way we vote here in Georgia.”

Despite his gripes about parts of the law, Duncan believes that passage of Senate Bill 202, now the Electoral Integrity Act of 2021, ensures that future elections in Georgia will be safer than ever with increased identification requirements and changes to early voting.

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But Democrats say there was nothing wrong with the election laws, as evidenced by the law that adopts strictly partisan lines. Instead, they argue, Republicans rolled out the new law in direct response to Democrats winning the presidential race and Senate second-round elections.

“SB 202 suppresses voters, criminalizes compassion and seizes electoral authority from local and state officials,” former Democratic House leader Stacey Abrams tweeted Thursday, shortly after Kemp signed the bill after it passed the Republican-majority Senate. “Republicans adopted and signed # SB202 to signal their surrender to lies about the truth. Fear for fairness. To suppression rather than participation. “

From now on, the courts will decide the fate of the law. On Wednesday afternoon, three civil rights organizations – the New Georgia Project, the Black Voters Matter Fund and the Georgia NAACP – filed separate legal challenges against the law, saying it would disproportionately affect elderly voters and people of color.

“The thinly veiled attempt to roll back the progress we have made in empowering Georgians to express their voices in the democratic process creates an arbitrary law that does not improve voter confidence, does not guarantee integrity election nor increase access to the ballot box ”. The Rev. James Woodall, Georgia State President NAACP, said in a statement.

The most glaring change adopted in the new law concerns absentee voting. The earliest voters can now apply for a postal ballot is 77 days before an election, instead of the 180 days previously allotted. In addition, the deadline for completing a postal vote request has been extended by one week. Republicans say these changes will reduce the number of rejected ballots due to tight turnaround times.

GOP State Representative Alan Powell said the new law brings consistency to an electoral system that has been severely stressed in the last electoral cycle.

“The Georgian electoral system was never designed to be able to handle the volume of votes it processed,” he told The New York Times. “What we have done in this bill before you is that we have cleaned up the cogs, the mechanisms of our electoral system.

Unsurprisingly, Democrats disagree.

A record 1.3 million Georgians voted absent in the general election, with then-candidate Joe Biden nearly doubling Trump’s total, securing nearly 850,000 votes to 450,000 for Trump. Democrats see the tightening of restrictions as a form of retaliation. The new arrangements, progressives say, do away with voting for marginalized communities, including black Georgians who surrendered in record numbers in the last election cycle, some of whom were relying on longer delays to return their ballots.

Nikema Williams, Georgia’s most recent Democratic MP, told CNN on Sunday that she believed the state’s recent progressive victories were fueling a backlash from the GOP.

“The Republicans are pushing back and they are upset that we were able to win,” she said. “And so they’re going to do everything in their power right now to restrict access for people who primarily look like me to vote.”

The new electoral law also has new voter identification requirements for requesting and returning a ballot. Candidates must now include their driver’s license number, state identification number, or a copy of other acceptable voter ID. But many poor Georgians and people of color living in rural communities do not have state-issued identity cards, potentially excluding them from participating in future elections.

Senator Raphael Warnock, one of Georgia’s two new Democratic senators, questioned the motives of Republican leaders who support this law.

“You are literally going to build public policy based on a lie, on the basis of the feeling that some people have that things did not go the way they should have been?” Warnock said at an event in Atlanta on Friday. “Is this how we make public policies?”

Defending the new law, Kemp said on Tuesday that it was “expanding access” to voting.

“I think when people are educated about the bill and are not subject to people misleading them on the other side about what this bill actually does,” he told NPR on Tuesday , “I think they will understand well why the General Assembly took the actions they did.

A positive point of the new law cited by supporters and critics of the legislation is that it expands early voting possibilities, making Saturday voting compulsory while keeping Sunday hours optional. In addition, counties can now have early voting hours of up to 12 hours per day, with a minimum of eight hours.

But another point of contention in the law is its changes to the National Elections Council. The secretary of state will no longer chair the board of directors and the new president would be appointed by a majority of lawmakers in the House of Commons and the Senate. Current Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger, a Republican, came under fire after the 2020 election when he challenged Trump’s false allegations of voter fraud in the presidential election, and did not agree pressure not to certify results.

Duncan believes Raffensperger is being set aside for the “appeasement” of those who adhere to the “plot” that Trump should have one in 2020.

“The only thing [Raffensperger is] guilty of being the former president’s scapegoat, ”Duncan said.

Under the new law, the National Council of Elections will now have more power to intervene in county electoral councils deemed to be “underperforming,” which many argue leaves Republicans the option of overturning future elections which are deemed to be underperforming. do not unfold in their direction.

Hillary Holley, organizing director of Fair Fight, a nonprofit that encourages voter participation, believes that if these laws were in place in 2020, Republicans could have prevented the election from being certified and annulled the election. in favor of Trump.

“They are trying to change the fundamental workings of elections and that shouldn’t be a partisan issue,” Holley told Yahoo News.

Republican Representative Barry Fleming, a key voice in the creation of the law, called the provision “a temporary fix, so to speak, which ends and control is returned to the people once the issues are resolved.”

With the repercussions of Georgia’s new electoral law still being debated and its legality soon to be debated in the courts, Duncan said Republicans need to refocus on the challenges their constituents already face, rather than creating new ones.

“We have to dive into the communities and understand the real issues,” he said. “We can’t just use 280 characters to demonize people across the country, if not the world, if we’re going to get people to vote for us.”

Cover thumbnail illustration: Yahoo News; Photos: Elijah Nouvelage / Getty Images, Alyssa Pointer / Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP

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