Spearheaded by a 2020 Republican elector for President Donald Trump, the Georgia Republican Party is pitching an agenda to get rid of a week of early voting, end no-excuse absentee voting and eliminate automatic voter registration.
The party brought its wish list to a Republican-led legislative study committee that will soon recommend changes to state election laws.
Republican Party leaders have said for years that they want to make it “easy to vote and hard to cheat,” but the party’s goals would reduce voting options for the 4 million voters who cast early or absentee ballots in last year’s presidential election.
Democrats and voting rights groups say the GOP’s priorities would make it harder for Georgia voters to cast their ballots and would perpetuate policies driven by five years of grievances since Trump’s narrow loss to Democrat Joe Biden.
The GOP’s messenger, Brad Carver, was one of 16 Republicans who voted to award Georgia’s electoral votes to Trump in December 2020, and there is no indication his feelings have changed in the intervening years. He told the election study committee this summer he didn’t believe Biden was the legitimate winner, despite three vote counts and multiple investigations.
Credit: Nell Carroll for the Journal Constitution
Credit: Nell Carroll for the Journal Constitution
Besides limiting early and absentee voting, Carver told state legislators to enact State Election Board rules that the Georgia Supreme Court rejected, close primary elections to everyone but party members and withdraw Georgia from a 25-state voter registration accuracy organization called ERIC.
“The Georgia GOP agenda imposes unnecessary barriers on eligible voters,” said Natalie Crawford, a Republican former county commissioner who is now executive director of Georgia First, which advocates for democratic elections, economic opportunity and health care access. “Ironically, the Georgia GOP agenda that has been put forward ultimately would weaken the election integrity that it purports to protect.”
Carver, an attorney who leads the Republican Party’s Election Confidence Task Force, told legislators on the study committee last month that more changes to election laws are needed after Georgia’s voting overhaul in 2021 that focused on absentee voting and a later law that strengthened the ability of activists to challenge voters’ eligibility.
“We want every legal vote to count. We want a fair election system,” Carver said Aug. 28 at a study committee meeting in Clarkesville. “When you allow irregularities to happen, it devalues legal votes in the state.”
Claims of widespread fraud in the 2020 election have never been validated. While investigations have found some vote-counting errors, they’d debunked allegations of intentional wrongdoing, drop box ballot-stuffing and dead voters.
Credit: Daniel Varnado for the AJC
Credit: Daniel Varnado for the AJC
Democratic Party of Georgia Chair Charlie Bailey said the Republicans’ proposals would harm voters’ rights as they continue to tighten election laws.
“They don’t actually care one whit about the voters. They think they’re better than them, and they think that it is an acceptable thing to make it harder for them to vote because they’re afraid of what the will of the people would be,” Bailey said. “It’s a whole menu of making it harder to vote.”
Georgia Republican Party Chair Josh McKoon said his party’s voters still lack confidence in election integrity. He said the Republican proposals wouldn’t disenfranchise voters because they would still have many voting options.
“I don’t think we’ll see a reduction in our turnout, but I do think we’ll see a high degree of increase in our confidence,” McKoon said. “It’s heavy on security because that’s where we believe the emphasis needs to be.”
Republicans’ confidence in elections rose after Trump’s victory last year, according to a December poll by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Nearly 98% of poll respondents who identified themselves as Republicans said they believed their votes were counted as intended. Just 60% of Republicans said they were confident when the same question was asked after the 2020 election.
Turnout has remained high in elections since Georgia’s 2021 voting law, but fewer people have cast absentee ballots and many of them who did so in 2020 didn’t vote at all last year.
Early voting was the most popular way of casting a ballot during the three weeks before last November’s election, accounting for 71% of turnout. Trump received more early votes than Democrat Kamala Harris. Just 5% of Georgia voters returned absentee ballots.
McKoon defended Carver’s role as the spokesperson for the proposals because he lived through the 2020 election and knows what should be changed.
Kristin Nabers of the voting rights group All Voting is Local criticized Carver’s attempt to award Georgia’s electoral votes to Trump.
“The policy agenda being presented by a man who served as a fake elector seeking to overturn the 2020 election should tell us all we need to know,” Nabers said. “Despite that commitment to election denial and misinformation, he continues to serve as a spokesperson at these meetings to push proposals that would devastate voting access.”
Lawmakers will soon decide whether to pursue the Republican proposals during next year’s legislative session. The election study committee’s Thursday meeting will discuss the possibility of switching Georgia’s voting system to hand-marked paper ballots, another Republican priority.
“The Republican list is very extensive,” said House Governmental Affairs Chairman Victor Anderson, a Republican from Cornelia. “We try to look at every suggestion, every option presented, but look at it from the standpoint of how does this best serve all the citizens of Georgia.”
Anderson said legislators will have a better idea which of the Republican Party’s ideas they’ll support when the study committee finishes its work and makes recommendations later this fall.
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