Georgia’s advocates for suffrage are concerned that Republicans are holding back on the progress made in the state, after the election in November’s general election and the Senate’s runoff were a record election earlier this year.
A new series of bills emerging by Georgia’s legislature is raising red flags among voting rights groups, who say the state may not have seen the record-breaking record in recent races if the bills were in place.
“I do not know that 5 million people would have been successful in voting if the rules were the things they propose today,” said Andrea Young, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia.
The election bills tabled by Republicans of Georgia over the past few weeks include legislation terminating the absence of absentee ballots and the automatic registration of voters, limiting early voting on weekends and the time that voters the absent ballot papers must ask, and more identification to vote absent.
Nsé Ufot, founder of the New South super PAC, said if one of the bills including such elections was a factor in November, then Joe Biden
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Donald TrumpTrump announces new portion of approvals to DeSantis, Pence was confirmed in 2024 Republican poll. Lawmakers demand changes after National Guard troops at Capitol become ill from contaminated food MORE in the presidential election and Democrats Rev. Raphael Warnock
Raphael Warnock LeBron James’s more than a voice advertising campaign focuses on defending Klain’s voting rights over Harris breaking the band: ‘Every time he votes, we win’ The Georgia government, Kemp, says he’s Trump as a candidate in 2024 would ‘absolutely’ repay. and Jon Ossoff
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“If one of these bills were on the table in November, it would have wiped out the margin we saw, and that’s essentially what they’re trying to do,” Ufot, chief executive of the New Georgia Project, said. non-partisan group, said. who is registered more than 50,000 Georgians to vote last year.
In January, nearly 4.5 million votes were cast in Georgia’s main run, in which Warnock and Ossoff won a narrow victory over the then Sens. Kelly Loeffler
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The Democratic victories, which overturned control of the upper house in the US Congress to the party, came months after the state turned blue for a presidential candidate for the first time since 1992 in a general election in which more than 5 million votes were cast. another high watermark for total emergence. The same election also introduces a new high for the number of absentees per ballot.
Republicans in the state have claimed that the proposed voting measures are aimed at boosting the security of the election and the confidence of the public in Georgia’s election, after Trump crammed baseless allegations of widespread voter fraud when he sought to reverse the outcome of the presidential election .
“There is no theft of vote that has been substantiated,” Derrick Johnson, chief executive and president of the NAACP, told The Hill. “The only thing we’ve seen is more energetic, diverse and involved voter turnout from many communities.”
Johnson said conservatives “decided to seek measures to reduce voters’ ability to participate” when expanding their agenda to be more inclusive.
While Democrats have criticized the GOP-backed bills in Georgia in response to their party’s victory in the recent run-off and presidential election, some are also wondering whether the bills could hurt Republicans’ chances in the state by passing it on to their own supporters. making it harder to vote.
‘The interesting thing about oppressing voters is that it’s like chemotherapy. ‘It is to think that you will kill the cells you do not want more than you want the cells … and so that is the gamble they make,’ Young said.
“From our perspective, this is wrong because it makes it harder for Georgia citizens to vote, because all of these measures are targeted at voters in Georgia,” she added.
Larry Walker, Senate of the GOP, a sponsor of some of the bills in Georgia, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution last month that ‘the purpose of this proposal is not to make it difficult to vote legally. , but to make it harder to cast an illegal vote. ‘
The reasoning does not convince most advocates.
“We really need to stop pretending that something is redeemable in one of these accounts,” Ufot said, adding that she thinks the bills are “all designed” to create barriers to voting for “people who want access to the franchise and who wants to participate in our elections. ”
The New Georgia project is being investigated by the Republican Secretary of State of Georgia over the methods of helping some of the voters register in an investigation that Ufot called “biased and racist.”
‘What do they respond to [with these bills] “is a historic election, where the people who were historically denied or did not participate in their elections because they thought their vote did not count, they participated and they participated in large numbers this year,” Ufot said.
According to data released by the Pew Research Center last december, has registered more than 520,000 new voters in the state since 2016. The research revealed that there were significant gains in Latin-registered voters, a group that grew at almost the same rate as their white counterparts over the four-year period. registered voters, 260,000 to 3.8 million, in 2016. Asian registered voters, a group that totaled 188,000 in October 2020, also grew by 63,000, according to the center.
Black voters saw the largest increase in registration compared to the other racial groups, the center said. With an increase of nearly 130,000 people added to the electoral roll between October 2016 and October 2020, the group accounted for about a quarter of the increase in new registered voters seen in the state over the four-year period.
Democrats, Ossoff included, has a strong turnout of the ballot box, which leaves CNN poll data showed overwhelming blue in the general election in November and at the end of January, which is important to strengthen the party’s chances in Georgia.
The NAACP’s Johnson told The Hill there is a “new energy to use well-known voting-suppression tactics to restrict access to voting” in the country due to the fact that the Republican Party lost the two U.S. Senate seats in Georgia, along with Trump’s defeat in November.
“A lot of what has happened is perhaps the most aggressive repression initiative we have seen across the country since the 1950s,” he added.
As of Feb. 19, more than 250 bills containing provisions restricting access to voters will be considered in 43 states, according to the Brennan Center’s state bill. Of these bills, more than a dozen, all backed by Republicans, were tabled in the Georgia General Assembly alone.
Among the proposals, Ufot addressed a provision in measures such as Bill 531, which recently passed the State House in a party vote, which would limit the previous vote on Sunday, a day that black churches in the state used earlier to increase voter turnout among congregations with “Souls to the Polls” efforts.
Bishop Reginald Thomas Jackson, chairman of the Sixth Episcopal District of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, which includes more than 500 churches in the Peach State, issued a scathing reprimand of the provision late last month, citing another attempt to Blacks ‘to oppress’ called. voice. ”
“We used ‘Souls to the Polls’ as a means of getting the elderly and other members of our congregations to vote, to gather for worship and after the worship to go to the polls to vote,” Jackson said. said.
Another provision in the bill that requires the requirement to identify photos for the absence of votes be proposed, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc. and the Southern Poverty Law Center, which addresses the ‘diverse impact’ of practice on ‘historically exempt rights’ in testimony submitted to a State House panel last month.
The groups said proponents of the bill did not provide sufficient evidence to support “vague allegations that voting-by-mail procedures are not safe in Georgia.” ‘
Young, Johnson and Ufot all agreed that the recent election bills in Georgia increase Congress to pass comprehensive voting measures such as the For The People Act, which the Democratic-led U.S. House voted largely along party lines. earlier this week, and the John Lewis
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In addition to extension of votes by post and to add election day to the government’s federal holidays, the People’s Act, also known as HR 1., would give the Department of Justice more to enforce suffrage.
The legislation is named after Lewis, a civil rights icon and former congressman in Georgia who died at the age of 80 last year, would also require states that have had repeated violations of voting rights in recent history to receive federal approval for voting changes, which restores a significant provision of the Voting Rights Act passed by the Supreme Court in 2013.
The legislation was introduced by Democrats in 2019 and passed through the House later that year. The Senate has not yet voted on the measure.
Georgia is one of the states that is expected to be subject to changes in the vote if legislation is introduced.