Because of a voter-suppression law passed by Georgia Republicans last year, the number of voters in the state who didn’t vote after ballot-by-mail applications were rejected increased 45-fold, according to reports a new analysis through Mother Jones.
In the 2021 local elections in Georgia, mail-in ballot applications were rejected at a high rate four times higher than in the 2020 election. Officials rejected a record 4 percent of absentee ballots.
Mother Jones analyzed how many voters did not vote in person because their letter requests were rejected, a rate that has also risen dramatically over the past year. Of the 1,038 applications rejected in 2021, only around a quarter ultimately voted in person. That’s about 2.19 percent of all mail-in voters — a huge increase from the 0.05 percent of voters who didn’t vote after an application was rejected in 2020.
As Mother Jones‘s Ryan Little and Ari Berman wrote that the number is “an example of how a seemingly small change in voter access can lead to a large increase in disenfranchisement.”
The voter suppression law, the Republicans passed through the legislature last spring contains a number of restrictions on postal voting. The new law implemented more strictly ID requirements for mail-in ballots, reducing the time voters can submit their ballot-by-mail applications by more than half, and reducing the number of mailboxes. The law also made it illegal for election officials to send out unsolicited ballot applications.
Voter disenfranchisement has flowed directly from these changes, reporting has noted. About 1 in 6 absentee ballots were discarded because voters misfilled their identification information under the new ID requirements.
If last year’s rejection rate were applied to the 2020 election, over 38,000 people would not have voted in the presidential election. That’s more than triple the margin of President Joe Biden’s win in Georgia; Biden won the state by just 11,000 votes.
The postal voting restrictions are more likely to affect the Democrats. Last year, 404 Democrats were rejected by voters voting in the 2020 primary, while only 145 Republicans received a rejection. In addition, 351 Democrats had their mail-in ballots rejected, while only 102 Republicans experienced the same thing.
It’s unclear why Democrats and Republicans are affected differently by the new changes.
However choice experts warned last year that Republican voter suppression laws were racist. So one reason for the law’s disproportionate impact could be that the restrictions disproportionately hit black voters; Black, Little and Berman make up 58 percent of registered voters who don’t have ID with the state, it pointed out. Black voters are voting in the state, according to Exit polls predominantly elected Biden in the 2020 election. Black voters also voted by mail more often than other demographics in the state.
Another reason could be that Democrats generally voted by mail a higher proportion as a Republican in the 2020 election. Mail-in ballots overwhelmingly went pro-Biden in some states, even in states that ultimately sided with Donald Trump, like North Carolina. However, Republicans had a narrow lead over Democrats in Georgia’s mail-in ballot.
Republicans in other states are also cracking down on mail-in ballots, with similar consequences. In Texas, the Republican Election Suppression Act resulted in a 700 percent Increase in rejected mail-in ballot applications in Houston’s Harris County, the went for Biden in 2020.
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