A contingent of Georgia Republican lawmakers is tracking electoral legislation to renegotiate the sweeping 2021 electoral law overhaul, which was spurred by unsubstantiated claims that former President Donald Trump lost the 2020 Georgia election due to fraudulent absentee voting and illegal voter voting .
The most controversial electoral law of the 2023 legislature so far is Senate Bill 221, which went through a Senate ethics committee on Tuesday night after a number of amendments and concerns raised about whether it could pass statutory scrutiny. The 20-page bill would ban counties from offering mailboxes, expand the ability for mass voting eligibility challenges, and establish more security measures for ballots.
The legislation, sponsored by Ethics Committee Chair and Sylvania Republican Max Burns, cleared the committee’s hurdle ahead of Monday’s crossover day, the deadline for bills to move out of one of the legislative chambers to provide a clear path to approval this year create.
Electoral and civil rights organizations Fair Fight Action, ACLU of Georgia, Common Cause Georgia and Progress GA say the provisions in the measure would lower the bar for removing a voter from a county’s list and unfairly targeting poll workers.
The bill would allow a voter’s eligibility to vote to be challenged primarily based on information found in a national change of address database, which election experts on Tuesday said was unreliable.
The voting rights coalition said it was of particular concern that the legislation undermined voters’ rights and further encouraged the frivolous and largely dismissed previous challenges to voting eligibility.
Esosa Osa, deputy executive director of Fair Fight Action, says this year’s bill is a continuation of the Republican-backed sweeping overhaul of the election law, Senate Bill 202, passed just months after the 2020 presidential election.
“Georgia Republicans, who last year touted election effectiveness and even urged limiting challenges, have capitulated to extremists and renewed attacks on our democracy by empowering conspiracy theorists with unprecedented power a day after data was released , exposing the discriminatory effects of their unfounded voter challenges,” Osa said in a statement.
The bill provides that a voter can be disqualified by address databases released by the U.S. Postal Service, which can be substantiated by at least one other factor, ranging from insurance changes to a person presenting “reasonably reliable evidence” in an affidavit submits.
Federal Returning Officer Blake Evans was among the witnesses who testified at Tuesday’s committee meeting about concerns that the bill could violate a federal voter registration law by not going through the proper channels to confirm where a voter lives and that the change of address database located unreliable.
Mass election campaigning became more common after the 2020 presidential election, when right-wing voter watch group True the Vote joined forces with the Republican Party of Georgia in a campaign to challenge the eligibility of hundreds of thousands of Georgia voters.
The new legislation aims to clarify areas that have been challenged to ensure all 159 counties comply with Georgia law, Burns said at the committee meeting this week.
“You’ll find that we’ve looked a lot at election security, a lot at election access, digital access to elections and voter challenges,” he said. “If you have not changed your permanent address, the fact that your name appears on the register of change of address is not a sufficient ground of challenge.”
The types of poll workers allowed into a secure room where the ballots are kept are specified, as is a Chain of Custody protocol that dictates that blank ballots be kept in sealed containers and that two people sign a transfer form when the ballots are returned transported between constituencies.
Prosecutors could not be held liable for wrongdoing if they make a good faith effort to investigate allegations of violations of electoral laws, Burns suggested.
The bill also includes a requirement that poll workers must be US citizens and be “prudent, intelligent and honest.”
Tiffany Muller, president of End Citizens United // Let America Vote Action Fund, called on Georgia lawmakers to reject Burns’ election bill.
“From lowering standards of proof for contesting election results to banning the use of Dropbox to empowering conspiracy theorists, SB 221 is an outright assault on Georgia’s freedom of choice,” she said in a statement. “Republicans aren’t even shy that this bill is a direct response to more people of color voting and making their voices heard. Instead of winning elections on merit and ideas, they try to keep their power by changing the rules.”
Several other election-related bills were introduced during this session, including two local GOP-sponsored bills that organizations like Black Voters Matter claim are a coordinated effort to increase the number of black school board members on the Ware County and Macon-Bibb election boards to reduce district.
In House Bill 422 and Senate Bill 227, Electoral Board members would be appointed by the Ware and Macon-Bibb Borough Commissions rather than by the major political parties and the Chair of the Electoral Board.
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