In the face of demographic change, desperate Georgia Republicans attempt to carpet-bomb voting rights, even if some of those "stop the steal" types are collateral damage

 

Republicans in Georgia, “shocked” that their supposedly safely “red” Deep South state found itself gong “blue” in both the presidential and the U.S. Senate elections, are on the move to prevent this from happening again. Of course it is Donald Trump who is principally at fault for this strange occurrence, but the Republican-controlled state senate has put forward a number of bills that attempt to dramatically reduce the rights of legal voters in the state. Six of the cosponsors—Jeff Mullis, Steve Gooch, Matt Brass, Tyler Harper, Brandon Beach and Bruce Thompson—continue to espouse evidence-free election conspiracy nonsense, and were also a part of  Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s failed lawsuit to overturn the election. Paxton was indicted for securities fraud in 2015 and is still awaiting trial on those charges, and is currently being investigated for bribery; his lawsuit was an obvious effort to persuade Trump to give him a pardon, which didn't happen.  

The PBS affiliate Georgia Today detailed the proposed voter suppression bills the other day, which include the following:

SB 67 would require that all non-military absentee ballots must include a driver’s license or other valid state ID number. Previously, submitting such identification online or during in-person voter registration was sufficient, but now any mail-in ballot will be automatically rejected if it does not include such numbers written in by the voter. Another proposed bill, SB 29, would go further, requiring voters to include a photocopy of their identification for both registration forms and with their mail-in ballots.

SB 68 would disallow “the use of secure 24/7 monitored drop boxes as a method of returning absentee ballots.” Due to the pandemic, these boxes were implemented because of the reduction in polling stations and the number of poll workers. Banning even secure drop boxes seems to be going a bit too far, but it gets worse.

SB 69 would ban “motor voter registration,” meaning that people who update their driver’s license will not be able to register to vote at the same time. More than 70 percent of Georgia’s voters were registered to vote in this way. Again, those Republicans who promoted election fraud conspiracies cosponsored this outrageous bill.

SB 70 “would prohibit voters who participated in a November statewide general election outside of Georgia from being eligible to vote in any Georgia runoff for U.S. House or Senate.” The wording of this bill seems confusing on its face, since it suggests that someone who is a Georgia resident but currently outside the state can vote in the November general election, but not in a run-off election. It is a felony for non-Georgia residents to vote in the state’s elections, and the only “evidence” of voter fraud in this way was by a Florida Republican who not only deliberately did so, but openly publicized it in an effort to “prove” voter fraud.

SB 71 “would eliminate no-excuse absentee by mail voting, instead limiting it to those who are disabled, ‘required to be absent’ from their precinct, work in elections, have a religious reason or are 75 or older.” This bill is yet another pointless “solution” looking for a “problem.” It was Republicans who passed a law allowing mail-in balloting years before the pandemic, in the belief that since it was older, Republican-leaning voters who were more likely to vote by this method. But during the pandemic a wider swath of voters cast ballots by this method. Again, several recounts found no evidence of voter fraud, yet Republican conspiracy diehards are throwing in everything and the kitchen sink to disenfranchise voters.

SB 72 “would require county elections officials to receive monthly updates about residents who have died and determine if they need to be removed from the voter rolls.” Again, false claims of “dead people” voting is behind this. The only evidence of “fraud” was instances where voters were “mistakenly” accused of being “deceased” when they were actually alive and legally registered to vote. There is already a state requirement to be updated on changes in voting status, such as moving out of state or no longer with the living, and the new requirement is just another needless excuse to find a way to squeeze a few more voters out of the rolls.

SB 73 “would only allow the Secretary of State's office, county elections officials, candidates or candidate campaign committees to send out paper absentee ballot applications to voters, prohibiting third-party and nonprofit groups from sending mailers.” Both Republican and Democratic groups sent out absentee ballot applications, but because it is generally assumed that Democratic voters are more likely to take advantage of mail-in voting, this is very bad, without any actually research done to see how this will also effect Republican turnout. Some of the sponsors of this bill were naturally making the false claim that absentee ballot applications were actual ballots themselves. Democrats, of course, should be concerned if partisan Republican election officials were solely responsible for sending out the applications, because they might “red line” known heavily Democratic districts.

SB 74 “would expand access for partisan poll watchers to view the vote counting process, allowing elections officials to restrict what poll watchers can see or do but directing them to be ‘as minimal as possible.’" This “poll watching” scheme is a worthless bit of showmanship that as demonstrated in the several recounts proved nothing, and was merely an intimidation tactic. Democratic observers found themselves just there to keep an eye on the antics of Republican observers; at least one Republican “observer” was reported to be disputing every Biden vote.  

In response to these bills, Seth Bringman of the voting rights group Fair Fight stated that “This unhinged set of voter suppression bills from a radical Senate Republican leadership appears intended to appease conspiracy theorists like those who stormed the Capitol last month. The bills are unnecessary by Republicans' own assessments of the 2020 election, and designed to limit access and help Republicans stop losing elections in Georgia. Republicans wrote Georgia's election laws, but they were humiliated on Nov. 3 and Jan. 5, so they are seeking to silence Georgians, particularly communities of color, who exercised their power to change Georgia…Their desperation to hold onto power at the expense of Georgians' constitutional right to access the ballot has never been clearer."

All of these bills if passed will be challenged in court. In fact most of the state’s top Republican brass—Gov. Brian Kemp, Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan, Speaker of the House David Ralston and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger have pushed back against the election fraud conspiracies, and oppose most of the proposed changes outside of tightening ID requirements. Raffensperger in particular has been adamant about the integrity of the election, no doubt for his own reputation but also in defense of “pride” in the state having “record setting” voter turnout using a “new, secure, paper ballot voting system."

But Republicans discombobulated by the fact that this Georgia is different from the one they took control of earlier this century are desperately seeking ways to keep their finger in the hole in the dike. Two-thirds of the state’s growing population is in the Atlanta metropolitan area which has become more diverse, while the population has decreased in the smaller, mostly white rural areas that trend Republican. These efforts by Trumpists to disenfranchise Democratic-leaning votes could temporarily stem the tide, but not for long without being so obvious as to be thrown out  by the courts.

While other states with Republican-dominated legislatures, like Pennsylvania, Arizona and North Carolina, are attempting to enact voter suppression bills, Michigan’s Democratic Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson is proposing changes that make counting votes more efficient, and includes a proposal to make election day a state holiday, thus making it easier for people to take time off work to vote. Naturally the Republicans who control both houses of the legislature are calling this a “partisan” sideshow.

One thing that is clear is that Republicans consider it in their “interest” to disenfranchise as many voters as they can, in the hope that the majority of them are Democratic-leaning. It is highly ironic that the “stop the steal” rioters are completely unmindful of the fact that some of them are “collateral damage” in this effort—like a carpet-bombing of a city, which doesn’t discriminate between “friend” and “foe.”