The Real Purpose Behind Georgia's Voting Law Changes
Misinterpretation of the new changes are keeping the discussion focused on the wrong things
Once again, the state of Georgia finds itself in the national news due to an election-related controversy. Governor Brian Kemp recently signed into law SB-202, or the Election Integrity Act of 2021, which makes some controversial changes to voting laws in the state. The national reaction to SB-202 has been intense, with comparisons to Jim Crow laws being tossed out like beads at a Mardi Gras parade.
A disclaimer before I get into discussing the changes in voting law -- this isn’t meant to be an exhaustive explanation of the 98-page bill, as there is quite a lot in there that isn’t of interest to anyone who is not a Georgia voter. Come to think of it, none of this should be of interest to you if you are not a Georgia voter but all stories are national stories now and SB-202 has become the latest flashpoint in the ongoing culture war.
Let me start by saying that SB-202 is not Jim Crow, Jim Eagle, or any other Jim you can name. It is a bill that makes changes to voting law in Georgia, not a bill bringing back segregation. Viewing this bill through the lens of race has not only caused some wildly disproportionate responses to it but has served to obfuscate what this bill does and who it really targets.
That being said, this bill is certainly a mixed bag for me. There are some changes I agree with, some I don’t love but can understand, and some that I find highly questionable. My biggest concern with SB-202 is that it exists at all -- this bill feels like an attempt to fix the mess Trump made in Georgia by giving his base the impression that something went horribly wrong with the 2020 election in Georgia. Crafting voting laws to soothe the mislead is no way to craft voting laws, and the topic of Republicans possibly disenfranchising voters has been an extremely touchy one in Georgia since the 2018 gubernatorial election. While I do think many of the arguments against SB-202 aren’t being made in good faith, Georgia Republicans did themselves no favors in including the more controversial aspects of the bill.
The part of SB-202 that has generated the largest amount of controversy is the stipulation that only poll workers can distribute water to voters standing in line and the outlawing of any third party passing out food and water within 150 of a polling location or within 25 feet of any voter in line. Strictly speaking, this would mean that I couldn’t give the person behind me in line a bottle of water or share my fruit snacks with their fussy child even if my only intent is to be a good person. Ostensibly the idea behind the provision is to keep campaign workers away from voters standing in line, but it has been illegal for campaign workers to be within those same distance parameters for any reason since 2010. Georgia has fairly strict laws making it a misdemeanor offense for anyone, official campaign worker or not, to approach voters in line at a polling station in any way that could be seen as vote solicitation; I have no idea why this provision is in SB-202 other than the bill’s writers wanting to be massive jerks.
The reactions to this portion of the law have been heated, to say the least. Let me clarify one of the biggest misconceptions about the provision -- you are still free to bring your own food and drink to consume while waiting in line at a polling location, nobody is expecting you to go without food or water completely. I doubt that there will be cops hiding in the bushes waiting to slap cuffs on you for splitting a granola bar with your fellow voter either. That being said, the provision is ridiculous and has no business being part of SB-202.
The part of SB-202 that is of much more consequence to Georgia voters than Watergate 2021 is the changes to absentee voting. Georgia has a policy of allowing any registered voter to vote via absentee ballot, no questions asked, a policy that I would like to see more states adopt. But SB-202 has severely cut into the timeframe for requesting and returning absentee ballots -- requests can now only be made 77 days before an election instead of the previous 180 days, the deadline for requesting an absentee ballot has been moved to two Fridays before an election instead of the Friday before an election, and counties will not mail out absentee ballots until four weeks before an election instead of seven weeks.
I don’t like this at all -- Georgia should be looking to expand absentee voting, in order to ease lines at polling locations and better meet voters’ needs for whom in-person voting is difficult. As a nation, we need to be looking for ways to modernize the voting process so that every person who wishes to vote can do so easily. There is also evidence that mail-in voting makes for better-informed voters, especially when it comes to down-ballot races or initiatives that a voter might not know much about before seeing them on a ballot, shortening the window of time a voter has to do that research is not good policy.
Absentee ballots now have new voter ID requirements as well, instead of signature matching Georgia will require ID verification through a state ID number (driver’s license, state ID card, or another acceptable form of ID). Voter ID laws like this are controversial since they run the risk of disenfranchising anyone who doesn’t have a state-issued ID or another form of ID, but I accept that if mail-in voting becomes as popular as I’d like then an ID process that is quicker and more iron-clad than signature matching will have to be adopted. Since state-based voter ID is now the law in Georgia, I’d like to see community groups start working now to make sure that every registered voter who doesn’t have a current state ID card gets one before the next election.
The application process for an absentee ballot has been streamlined by making permanent the online request portal on the Secretary of State’s official website that was set up to handle the massive increase in applications during the COVID pandemic; that is a great first step to making absentee voting easier in Georgia. SB-202 sets some troubling restrictions on sending out paper applications for absentee ballots, however, especially in light of the new voter ID requirement. State and local governments can no longer send out unsolicited applications and third-party groups have to be explicit as to who they are and that what they are sending out is not an official government document.
At first glance there seems to be nothing wrong with that -- Georgia certainly doesn’t want voters applying for and receiving multiple ballots, possibly leading to a voter submitting multiple ballots (stop me if you think you’ve heard this one before). The issue is, with a state ID-based voter ID system one voter submitting multiple ballots is supposed to be impossible. That is the core of the argument for state-based voter ID, that it makes it impossible for one voter to vote multiple times. With the new voter ID system in place, it shouldn’t matter if a potential voter gets zero or 1000 unsolicited applications since only one ballot per state ID number will be issued. Restricting unsolicited applications would mean that either Georgia Republicans don’t have faith in state ID-based voter ID to stop voter fraud, or they want to limit the number of people who learn about and request absentee ballots.
And then there is the issue of absentee ballot drop boxes. The good news is, drop boxes are here to stay and every country in Georgia has to have at least one. The bad news is, the boxes are capped at either one per every 100,000 active voters (no that is not a mistype) or one per every early voting site, whichever is smaller (that’s not a mistype either). The boxes will no longer be available 24 hours a day either, they must be physically located within an early voting site and will only be accessible when the site is open. This creates two problems; high-density counties like the ones in the Atlanta metro area are not going to have near enough drop boxes to meet demand, and voters who want to drop their ballots off in a dropbox as opposed to mailing them will still have to get to a polling station during operating hours. There is an additional time constraint at play here as well; remember that absentee ballots will not be mailed out until four weeks before an election.
The reason given for limiting the amount of and placement of the drop boxes is for security purposes. Let me remind you -- there is not and has never been any evidence that anything untoward happened with absentee voting in Georgia. There are zero reasons to throttle back access to drop boxes that make any kind of logical sense and plenty of reasons for expanding access to them that do. If Georgia Republicans are that concerned about their safety, there are plenty of other surveillance options other than limiting the number of boxes and placing them inside polling stations.
SB-202 does have some excellent provisions, one of which is expanding early voting availability. Now, early voting polls must be open for two Saturdays instead of one, polls are open a minimum of 9 am to 5 pm, and Sunday voting hours are now officially recognized as an option. Two changes that seemed aimed at preventing another election fiasco are replacing the Secretary of State, an elected position in Georgia, as chair of the State Election Board with a non-partisan appointee and requiring poll watchers to undergo training before being allowed to work.
The new hour requirements for early voting sites are another area of SB-202 that have been misinterpreted, this time by President Biden. The law requires that voting sites be open a minimum of 9 am to 5 pm, not a maximum, and hours can be expanded out as far as 7 am to 7 pm. The new schedule requirement is meant to increase access to early voting sites in rural areas, not minimize access in urban areas.
How one interprets SB-202 is dependent on how charitable one wants to be in interpreting the goals of Georgia Republicans. As I said earlier, this feels like an attempt to fix what Trump broke by addressing problems that didn’t exist anywhere but in his and his supporters’ heads. It is one of the dumbest episodes of rake stepping I’ve seen and the fallout is costing the city of Atlanta and the state of Georgia millions of dollars in revenue. Thanks for nothing, dipshits.
Whatever the intent of SB-202 is, the practice of it will disenfranchise a certain group of voters. This is where the current narrative around the bill fails to address the real issue -- this isn’t meant to target Black voters, it’s meant to target Democratic voters by targeting voters who live in high-density areas like, oh I don’t know, Atlanta. It isn’t hard to look at SB-202, look at the electoral map of Georgia circa the 2020 general election, look back at SB-202, and see whose concerns it is meant to address at whose expenses.
That is genuinely controversial, and where the criticism of this bill should be focused. Framing the discussion of SB-202 strictly in terms of race is allowing Georgia Republicans to avoid being lambasted for their actual intent in passing the new voting laws, which looks to be a blatant attempt to disenfranchise voters in high density, Democratic-leaning areas of the state by altering the rules around absentee voting. Georgia is hardly the only state where Republicans are determined to change voter laws in order to restrict access, that is why it’s vital to call this attack what it is instead of what is culturally trendy.
Don’t miss the forest for the trees on this.
As a non-GA citizen this clears up a lot.
In the 7th paragraph, I think this out to be returning instead of requesting
"the deadline for requesting an absentee ballot has been moved to two Fridays before an election instead of the Friday before an election,"
Out of the issues you discuss, only the timeframe for requesting, receiving and returning an absentee ballot is a clear net negative for Georgia voters, having been clearly shortened. Limiting clerks from sending ballots no more than 4 weeks before the election, is especially weird given that ballots sent overseas will continue to be sent 7-weeks ahead of the election.
That said, for the remainder of your objections:
1) The Voter ID requirements can be met by printing last 4 digits of the voter’s SSN and providing a copy of any of the following documents: copy of a current utility bill, bank statement, government check, paycheck, or other government document that shows the name and address of the voter. Even for those who don’t have a driver’s license or can’t get a voter ID it really should be a non-issue.
2) The application process for receiving an absentee ballot was designed to avoid all the issues, confusion and voter frustration raised in this ProPublica story: https://bit.ly/3uog3ua
It has nothing to do with limiting access to requesting an absentee ballot, so much as preventing your dead relative’s mailbox being spammed with misleading junk mail from a dodgy outfit that purchased an outdated voter mailing list.
3) Lastly absentee ballot drop boxes. Prior to 2020 these didn’t exist, so there’s nothing being taken away from voters - in fact drop boxes are an additional voting option being enabled by the law for the first time. Let’s not forget, absentee ballots were always meant to be mailed - so every Post Office box is a “drop box”. The tighter windows for receiving an absentee ballot also provide a benefit here - (since they’re mailed no later than 11 days before an election) it provides plenty of time for voters to fill out their ballot and drop it in the mail with plenty of time to spare.