Recently enacted law changes for Georgia elections have become a lightening rod for national debate on voter integrity following the 2020 election cycle. (Photo by Beau Evans)
Georgians’ support or disapproval of the state’s controversial new voting law largely broke along political party lines in a survey the University of Georgia released Wednesday.
Republican voters in the survey supported while Democratic voters opposed the more high-profile measures in the recently enacted elections bill, which has become a lightning rod for national debate on election integrity and voter access following the 2020 election cycle.
Democratic leaders in Georgia and across the country have framed Georgia’s new voting law as an attempt at voter suppression targeting minority voters who helped the state’s 2020 presidential election and both U.S. Senate seats go to Democrats.
Republican leaders mostly have argued the voting measures were needed to boost confidence in the state’s election system amid former President Donald Trump’s fraud claims, which state election officials and federal courts rejected.
The survey, conducted by UGA’s School of Public and International Affairs, asked questions to 887 Georgians split about evenly among Republican and Democratic voters over a three-week period after the bill’s enactment late last month. It had a 95% confidence level.
The party-line trend held true for Georgia Republican and Democratic voters when asked if they thought the new voting measures would strengthen the state’s election system or harm it, as well as whether the intent was to bolster election integrity or make it harder to vote for certain groups to cast ballots.
The vast majority of surveyed Republicans responded that the measures will help improve election integrity and voter access. Most Democrats responded in the opposite.
Similarly, a wide majority of Republicans responded that they lacked confidence in their 2020 votes being fairly counted and that President Joe Biden won Georgia’s presidential election due to fraud. Democratic respondents dismissed fraud claims and doubt in Biden’s win.
Among the most testy proposals in the bill was a requirement for mail-in voters to provide a driver’s license or other official form of identification when casting absentee ballots. Roughly 93% of Republicans supported that measure, while 61% of Democrats opposed it.
Republicans overwhelmingly favored shortening Georgia’s runoff period from nine weeks to four, requiring absentee drop boxes to be placed in county election offices and voting precincts, moving back the deadline to request absentee ballots from four days before an election to 11 days, and barring election officials from sending voters unsolicited absentee ballot applications.
Democrats mostly opposed those measures in the survey. Independent voters were generally divided half in favor, half opposed.
Republicans also overwhelmingly supported a new prohibition against allowing voters to cast provisional ballots at precincts that they have not been officially assigned. Democrats mostly opposed that measure.
In contrast, both partisan and independent voters largely supported new rules for counties to keep polls open for two mandatory Saturdays and two optional Sundays during the three-week early voting period.
Fewer Republicans supported measures allowing state election officials to temporarily take over poor-performing county election boards and a ban on non-poll workers from handing out food and drinks within 150 feet of voters waiting in line outside precincts.
Those measures attracted nearly 50% of support from Republicans, with the bulk of Democrats opposing.
ATLANTA – Gov. Brian Kemp defended Atlanta-based The Home Depot Inc. Tuesday after a group of Black Georgia faith leaders called for a nationwide boycott of the company over its position on the state’s controversial election law.
“They did not ask to be in this political fight,” Kemp told reporters during a news conference. “It’s unfair to them, their families and their livelihoods to be targeted.”
Home Depot released a statement after Kemp signed Senate Bill 202 late last month that “all elections should be fair, accessible and secure.”
But the bill’s opponents criticized the statement as not strong enough, particularly when other Atlanta-based companies including Delta Air Lines Inc. and Coca-Cola Co. have forcefully condemned the legislation.
“A boycott is not something we wanted to do, but now it is something that we must do,” Bishop Reginald T. Jackson, who oversees Georgia’s African Methodist Episcopal churches, said Tuesday.
“Blacks and people of color, like others, are also [Home Depot] customers and they benefit from our dollars. … We believe they should oppose any effort to suppress our votes.”
While faith leaders were on the front lines Tuesday in calling for a boycott, Kemp said the effort is being led by Democrats intent on pressuring businesses to get behind congressional passage of sweeping voting rights legislation.
“This is not about Georgia’s election law,” he said. “This is about a movement at the national level to nationalize elections and have an unconstitutional takeover of state elections.”
The bill, which cleared the Republican-controlled General Assembly last month along party lines, replaces the signature-match verification process for mail-in ballots with an ID requirement. It also restricts the location of drop boxes and prohibits non-poll workers from handing out food and drinks within 150 feet of voters standing in line.
But it also expands weekend early voting hours in most Georgia counties and authorizes the use of drop boxes in state law for the first time.
By comparison, Kemp said voting laws in Democratic states including New York, New Jersey and President Joe Biden’s home state of Delaware are more restrictive than Georgia’s new law.
That message has been lost in the rush to boycott Georgia-based companies and in Major League Baseball’s recent decision to pull the All-Star Game out of Georgia, the governor said.
“We have to stand up and tell people the truth about Senate Bill 202,” Kemp said. “It makes it easy to vote and hard to cheat in Georgia.”
Home Depot has 90 facilities, 15 distribution centers and accounts for 30,000 jobs in Georgia, Kemp said.
The U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary held arguments for and against Georgia’s new election laws on April 20, 2021. (Official Senate video)
Georgia’s controversial new voting laws took center stage Tuesday at a U.S. Senate hearing where majority Democrats blasted changes in state voting rules as a revival of the Jim Crow era of segregation.
The hearing, entitled “Jim Crow 2021: The Latest Assault on the Right to Vote,” featured several Georgia leaders including Democratic U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock, 2018 Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams and Georgia House Speaker Pro Tempore Jan Jones, R-Milton, who helped draft the Georgia law changes.
Leading members of the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary, which held Tuesday’s hearing, took turns echoing stances on Georgia’s election law from Democrats who frame the changes as acts of voter suppression and Republicans who argue the legislation was needed to bolster election integrity.
The Georgia bill, which Gov. Brian Kemp signed last month after party-line approval in the General Assembly, requires tighter absentee voter identification, empowers state officials to take over poor-performing county election boards, expands early-voting weekend hours and bans non-poll workers from handing out food and drinks within 150 feet of voters waiting in line outside precincts.
Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., who chairs the committee, said Georgia’s bill is among hundreds Republican lawmakers in several states have brought since the 2020 elections as part of a “wave of voter suppression laws” aimed at curbing minority voter participation.
“It seems Republican lawmakers in Georgia have concluded that the solution to their election problems is to make it harder to vote,” Durbin said. “That is fundamentally un-American. … It is democracy in reverse.”
Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, the committee’s ranking Republican, scoffed at Democrats’ attempts to paint Georgia’s new voting laws as racist, stressing the need to shore up election rules amid distrust among conservative voters following former President Donald Trump’s fraud claims.
“Baseless claims of voter suppression are just as corrosive to our democracy as baseless claims of voter fraud,” Grassley said. “We should all be committed to making elections accessible and secure to maintain the confidence of voters in elections.”
The law changes in Georgia have become a lightning rod for national lawmakers to push for passing federal legislation that would broaden access to mail-in and early voting and revive oversight provisions in the 1965 Voting Rights Act that were pushed by the late Congressman John Lewis of Atlanta.
Warnock, who won election to the Senate in January, said federal legislation is needed to tamp down “a full-fledged assault on voting rights” spurred by the new Georgia law.
“We’ve got to act,” Warnock said at Tuesday’s hearing. “History is watching us, our children are counting on us and we must pass federal voting rights legislation no matter what.”
Abrams, who founded the voting-rights advocacy group Fair Fight and will likely challenge Kemp in a 2022 rematch for governor, also called for federal election legislation to stave off the impacts of law changes such as those seen recently in Georgia.
“When the fundamental right to vote is left to the political ambitions and prejudices of state actors … federal intercession stands as the appropriate remedy,” Abrams said. “Simply put, [federal voting-rights legislation] is essential to the advancement of democracy.”
Republicans testifying before the committee batted back claims Georgia’s election laws would disenfranchise voters. They also condemned some companies that have denounced the new laws including Major League Baseball, which pulled the All-Star Game from Atlanta earlier this month.
Jones highlighted changes lawmakers passed that limit outside funding in elections, add more weekend days to early voting and replace signature matching for mail-in ballots.
“It’s easy to write alarming words and give misleading sound bites that would lead people away from the facts,” Jones said. “And it’s just plain wrong.”
Not present at Tuesday’s hearing was Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican who has largely supported the new law changes despite facing attacks from Trump’s allies for not overturning last year’s elections results. Raffensperger slammed the Senate committee for not inviting him to testify.
“While I don’t love every part of this bill, it is no return to Jim Crow by any stretch of the imagination,” Raffensperger said in remarks he planned to read before the committee. “The comparison is insulting, morally wrong and factually incorrect.”
The Nathan Deal Judicial Center in downtown Atlanta is home to the Georgia Supreme Court. (Photo by Beau Evans)
ATLANTA – Whether a landowner whose property is damaged by the state can sue to stop the activity causing the damage was debated in the Georgia Supreme Court Tuesday.
Ware County landowner Cathy Mixon sued the state Department of Transportation (DOT) in 2018 claiming the widening of a road adjacent to her property has caused repeated serious flooding, diminishing the land’s value.
The lawsuit seeks damages and an injunction to prevent “future nuisance and continual trespass” based on the Takings Clause of the Georgia Constitution.
The DOT asked the trial court to dismiss the case based on the doctrine of “sovereign immunity,” which protects the state from being sued without its consent or a waiver approved by the General Assembly.
The agency lost before both the trial court and the Georgia Court of Appeals, leading it to take the case to the state Supreme Court.
On Tuesday, Senior Assistant Attorney General Loretta Pinkston-Pope argued an 1877 amendment to the Georgia Constitution permits property owners to sue for damages if their land has been damaged by the state. However, the so-called Takings Clause does not allow plaintiffs to seek injunctive relief that could prevent a public project from going forward, she said.
“Later cases clearly followed this line of reasoning,” Pinkston-Pope said.
But Douglas Gibson, Mixon’s lawyer, said Georgia cases going back to 1885 do allow property owners to seek injunctive relief.
While the lawsuit also seeks monetary compensation, Gibson argued an injunction is needed to stop a “continuing nuisance” on his client’s land.
“Water is being dumped on us because [the DOT] stopped up a ditch,” he said. “We want them to stop water backing up on us by fixing the drainage.”
Gibson said the Takings Clause waives sovereign immunity for claims for injunctive relief.
But several justices seemed skeptical. Justice Charlie Bethel pointed out that the highway widening project at issue in the case has been completed.
“How do I get an injunction at this point with a finished project?” Bethel asked Gibson.
Bethel went on to suggest Mixon’s claim should be limited to seeking damages.
The 2018 lawsuit predates a recent change in Georgia law governing sovereign immunity. Voters approved a constitutional amendment last November that prohibits the state and local governments from citing sovereign immunity to keep citizens from suing them when government officials commit unconstitutional actions.
ATLANTA – The vital national role Georgia played during the 2020 elections is leading to some high-volume political fund-raising in the Peach State early on in the 2022 election cycle.
U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Rome, raised nearly $5.9 million through the first three months of this year, a stunning first-quarter total for a House freshman.
On the other side of the aisle, U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., another newly elected member of Georgia’s congressional delegation, brought in more than $5.7 million during January, February and March.
Both Greene and Warnock drew national attention during their successful campaigns for different reasons.
Greene became a lightning rod for controversy when she embraced far-right conspiracy theories in social media postings to the point that the House voted in February to strip her committee assignments.
“I have been the most attacked freshman member of Congress in history,” Greene told CNN in a statement earlier this month. “I stood my ground and never wavered in my belief.”
Greene’s fund-raising prowess in the first quarter by comparison dwarfed the total progressive icon Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., hauled in during the same period two years ago as a freshman member of Congress.
The publicity “AOC” received in left-wing circles during and after her election victory in 2020 is comparable to the attention Greene is getting now.
“She has become a national figure, a celebrity on the far right,” said Kerwin Swint, a political science professor at Kennesaw State University. “I think she’ll continue to get attention and money from around the country.”
Greene likely doesn’t need so much money to win re-election in Georgia’s staunchly conservative 14th Congressional District, where Democrats generally fare poorly.
Warnock, on the other hand, already is starting to draw Republican opposition for next year’s Senate contest. While U.S. senators normally serve six-year terms, the Democrat will have to run again next year to complete the last two years of retired Sen. Johnny Isakson’s term.
Warnock and fellow Democrat Jon Ossoff captured Georgia’s two Senate seats in January runoffs over Republican incumbents, pulling Democrats into a 50-50 split with Republicans, just enough to gain control of the chamber because Vice President Kamala Harris is in position to break tie votes.
“That’s looked at as a nationally important Senate seat,” Swint said. “It’s going to yield a lot of money on both sides.”
More than a year and a half out from the 2022 general election, Atlanta banking executive Latham Saddler and Kelvin King, an Atlanta small-business owner, have declared their candidacies for Warnock’s Senate seat. U.S. Rep. Buddy Carter, R-Savannah, is considering running for the Senate.
Meanwhile, two Democratic House incumbents occupying competitive seats have gotten off to fast fundraising starts.
Rep. Lucy McBath of Roswell reported raising $918,550 during the first quarter, and the campaign of Rep. Carolyn Bourdeaux of Suwanee brought in $743,066 in January, February and March.
