Georgia lawmakers gave final approval on Thursday to impose sweeping new restrictions on voting rights in the state, making it more difficult to vote by mail and giving the state legislature more power over elections.
The measure was signed on Thursday night by Governor Brian Kemp, a Republican. “Major reforms to our state elections were needed. There is no doubt that there were many alarming problems with the way the elections were handled, and those problems understandably led to a crisis of confidence, ”Kemp said during prepared remarks shortly after signing the bill.
It requires voters to provide ID information with both an absentee ballot request and the ballot paper itself. It limits the use of absentee ballot dropboxes, allows unlimited challenges to a voter’s qualifications, shortens the second election period from nine to four weeks, and significantly shortens the time voters have to request an absentee ballot.
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The legislation also gives the state legislature, currently dominated by Republicans, the power to nominate a majority of its members to the five-member state election council. That provision would strip Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican who stood up to Trump after the election, from his current role as chairman of the board. The bill creates a mechanism for the administration to strip local electoral committees of their power.
Gloria Butler, a Democratic state senator, said the bill would make it more difficult to vote, especially for poor and disabled people. “We are witnessing a massive and unabashed attack on the right to vote, unlike anything we’ve seen since the Jim Crow era,” she said just before the bill passed.
“This bill is definitely about opportunities, but it is not about voting opportunities. It’s about being able to maintain control and power at all costs, ”Jen Jordan, a senator from the democratic state, said Thursday.
The legislation comes after Georgia saw record voter turnout in November elections and United States Senate layoffs in January, including spikes among black and other minority voters. It has become the center of national attention as many see it as a crystallization of a national drive by Republicans to make voting more difficult. Referring to a measure in the Georgia bill that prohibits providing food or water to people queuing to vote, Joe Biden called that national effort “sick” at a press conference on Thursday. “This makes Jim Crow look like Jim Eagle,” he said.
Faced with opposition from top Republicans in the state, the Republicans dropped an attempt to oblige voters to give an excuse to vote by mail. And amid national outrage, they have in recent weeks pulled back from proposals to ban early voting on Sundays, a day that black voters have traditionally used in disproportionate numbers to cast ballots. The measure passed Thursday actually expands the state’s early vote on weekends, requiring an additional Saturday and authorizing counties to offer it on two Sundays if they so choose.
Republicans took advantage of that provision in the bill on Thursday to claim that they were actually expanding access to voters in Georgia. “The bill greatly increases voter accessibility in Georgia and greatly improves the process of election administration, while at the same time increasing accountability to ensure that the vote is properly preserved,” said Barry Fleming, a GOP state representative who defends the election. was in charge of the legislation, said Thursday.
They offered little substantive justification as to why the measure was necessary after a record-breaking election, and in which multiple recounts in the presidential race failed to find evidence of fraud. Instead, they said the bill was necessary to maintain voter confidence.
The nearly 100-page evaluation was only formally revealed last week, when it was abruptly inserted into another two-page bill. While the legislation includes several measures that have been debated by lawmakers, it contained some new ideas that had not yet been fully debated. Democrats and voting activists have accused Republicans of ramming through a bill without vetting it completely.
Democrats and voting rights groups are expected to quickly file a slew of lawsuits against the measure.