ATLANTA – For the first time in a general election, voters are voting under the new rules created by Georgia’s electoral law on postal voting, weekend voting and contesting eligibility to vote.
Politicians on both sides are using the law to emphasize its impact on voters as turnout nears record highs for a midterm election.
Republicans say strong turnout debunks claims election law is suppressing voters; Democrats say voters are showing up despite the law.
“Georgia is easy to vote and hard to cheat,” Republican Gov. Brian Kemp said in a debate Sunday. He said his opponent, Democrat Stacey Abrams, “goes around scaring people because of oppressive voices and oppressive legislation.”
Abrams said high turnout doesn’t remove the barriers voters face.
“It is wrong to suggest that there is a link between voter turnout and voter suppression,” Abrams said in a news conference. “More people in the water doesn’t prove there are fewer sharks.”
Here’s a look at the impact so far of the state’s 98-page election law, Senate Bill 202, which the GOP-led General Assembly approved along party lines after Republican Donald Trump made unsubstantiated allegations of voter fraud when he lost the 2020 presidential election.
Back to personal voting
Voters are resuming their pre-pandemic behavior, spurred by electoral law regulations to abandon postal voting in favor of the in-person voting experience.
Mail-in voting rates have fallen to levels similar to the last half four years ago, when 6% of voters returned mail-in ballots. That’s a significant drop from the 26% of voters who cast ballots by mail in the presidential election two years ago.
According to the law, it is no longer possible to apply for a postal vote entirely online, as was the case before the 2020 presidential election in the first year of the coronavirus pandemic. The law requires voters to sign a paper form, which can then be submitted through a government website. Another requirement is for voters to provide identification along with a signature, usually a driver’s license or state ID number.
Government officials are banned from sending voters’ absentee requests after Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger did so ahead of the 2020 primary. Ballot boxes are restricted to early voting locations and times, and limited to one box per 100,000 active voters.
“It is too early to say whether or not SB 202 has adversely affected some people’s ability to vote,” wrote Michael McDonald, a University of Florida professor who directs the United States Elections Project, last week in his newsletter. “Nonetheless, there is already evidence that some voters are struggling to apply for absentee ballots.”
The electoral law required each district to offer early voting on two Saturdays and specifically allowed optional Sunday voting. Previously, early voting was only required on a Saturday, although some counties, particularly in metropolitan areas, offered voting every four weekend days during the state’s three-week early voting period.
Turnout on weekends was lower than on weekdays, but voters in all boroughs took advantage of the opportunity.
More than 80,000 people took part in the additionally required early voting Saturday on October 22, more than the 31,000 voters on this Saturday four years ago. There were also 93,000 voters last Saturday, down from the 107,000 voters that day in the previous half.
On the optional Sundays, 18,000 people voted on October 23 and 24,000 on October 30. For comparison: On the first Sunday of early voting in 2018, there were fewer than 6,000 voters and, at over 24,000, about the same turnout as on the second Sunday of this year.
Overall, total turnout topped 1.9 million through Tuesday, with early voting scheduled three days before Election Day.
Because the electoral law allowed unlimited challenges to voting eligibility, more than 65,000 Republican voter registrations were challenged that year. In the 3,200 cases where county election committees have upheld contested eligibility to vote, registrations are either canceled or voters are required to verify their information before they can cast a ballot.
Many of these challenges rely on change of address records as evidence that voters have moved to another state and are no longer able to vote in Georgia’s elections. But these records don’t always provide evidence that voters actually relocated, particularly in the case of students, military personnel, or residents who relocated temporarily for work.
Several voters say they only realized their eligibility to vote was being challenged when they turned up at polling stations during early voting. Some were able to overcome the challenges by showing ID and signing a residence permit, others learned that their registrations had been completely removed.
Prior to the electoral law, Georgia also allowed residents to contest eligibility to vote, but the law clarified that there is no limit to the number of registrations they can contest within the county in which they live.
The electoral law’s ban on handing out food or water to waiting voters was not tested by extreme wait times. Unlike the 2020 primary, when some Atlanta-area voters waited for hours, the lines for this year’s primary were typically short.
It is an offense under the law to serve food or drink to a voter who is within 25 feet of a line or within 150 feet of the perimeter of a polling station. Food and water can be distributed outside of these limits, and poll workers are allowed to set up self-service water containers.
Another provision of the law prohibits most votes from being cast in the wrong constituency on election day.
Before the law, voters were allowed to cast provisional ballots in a false voting district, and election officials counted the votes for races in which the voter was allowed to enter.
This year, provisional ballots cast in the wrong borough will only be counted if cast after 5 p.m. on Election Day, when voters would have little time to travel to their neighborhood boroughs.
According to state election data, poll workers counted 3,357 provisional ballots that were cast in the wrong polling district in the 2020 elections. Most of these ballots would have been discarded if the electoral law had been in effect at the time.
Copyright 2022 Tribune Content Agency.
