Voters trickle in to cast ballots during the early-voting period at State Farm Arena in Atlanta on Oct. 28, 2020. (Photo by Beau Evans)
ATLANTA – A court ruling Friday set the stage for another review of Georgia’s election results.
Henry County Superior Court Judge Brian Amero ordered Fulton County to unseal more than 145,000 absentee ballots to be examined for possible fraud.
Friday’s ruling stems from a lawsuit filed by Garland Favorito, a longtime election watchdog, and several other plaintiffs.
It comes more than five months after Georgia’s Electoral College members met at the state Capitol and certified the state’s 16 electoral votes for Joe Biden and more than four months after Biden’s victory was certified by Congress in a session interrupted when supporters of then-President Donald Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol, fought with police and vandalized offices inside.
The ruling drew praise from former U.S. Sen. Kelly Loeffler, R-Ga., who founded and chairs the voter registration group Greater Georgia.
“Voter confidence in our election system is the bedrock of our republic,” Loeffler said. “Unfortunately, inconsistencies in Fulton County’s November 2020 absentee ballots cast serious doubt on voters’ faith in our elections.
“The integrity of future elections is critical, and Judge Amero’s decision is a helpful step in restoring transparency, accountability, and voter confidence.”
Democrats accused Republicans of continuing to grasp at straws to overturn an election Biden clearly won.
“The votes have been counted multiple times, including a hand recount, and no evidence of fraud has been found,” Fulton County Commission Chairman Robb Pitts said.
“The fact remains that Fulton County safely and securely carried out an election in the midst of a public health crisis. It’s a shame to see that the ‘Big Lie’ lives on and could cost the hardworking taxpayers of this county.”
Biden’s razor-thin margin of victory of 11,779 votes over Trump in Georgia last November touched off a flurry of about 130 complaints of alleged voter fraud.
But lawsuit after lawsuit was dismissed, including a case in Cobb County where the Georgia Bureau of Investigation found no evidence of fraud following an audit of more than 15,000 absentee ballots.
Gov. Brian Kemp, Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger – all Republicans – defended the outcome of the election as legitimate.
But none of the dismissals satisfied either Trump or many other Georgia Republicans, who continue to insist the election was stolen.
The review of Fulton County absentee voters ordered by Amero mirrors an ongoing Republican-driven audit of the 2020 election results in Maricopa County, Ariz., another state Biden carried by a close margin.
The Kia plant in West Point, Ga., employs more than 2,700 workers.
ATLANTA – Georgia’s two U.S. senators are urging Senate leaders to fast-track legislation aimed at preventing shortages of semiconductors, citing next week’s temporary closure of the Kia plant in West Point for the lack of those electronic components.
Semiconductors are vital to the approximately 340,000 Kia cars manufactures in Georgia each year. But the coronavirus pandemic has strained the global supply chain, prompting a shortage of semiconductors that is forcing Kia to close the West Point plant on Monday and Tuesday.
Georgia Democratic Sens. Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock wrote a joint letter this week asking Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., to speed up consideration of a bill providing $52 billion to incentivize U.S. businesses to produce more semiconductors.
“American dependence on foreign suppliers of semiconductors is a strategic vulnerability for both our national and economic security, and ongoing shortages of this vital technology are directly harming workers and businesses in Georgia by disrupting operations of the Kia plant in West Point,” Ossoff and Warnock wrote.
“We must act swiftly and in a bipartisan manner to pass this legislation, which will boost American manufacturing of semiconductors and safeguard auto manufacturers like Kia Georgia against disruptions to the global supply chain.”
Kia and Hyundai Motor Co., also shut down several of their plants in South Korea this week, citing the shortage of semiconductors.
Supply chain issues forced the Kia West Point plant to shut down temporarily in March and April of last year. Company officials also cited the outbreak of COVID-19 at the time.
The $1.1 billion plant along Interstate 85 near the Alabama border employs more than 2,700 workers.
Environmental advocates say springtime harbor dredging in Georgia would harm nesting loggerhead sea turtles.
ATLANTA – Environmental advocates opposing a plan to dredge coastal Georgia shipping channels starting this month have won a court victory.
U.S. District Judge Stan Baker granted a preliminary injunction Thursday blocking the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers from dredging activity in Brunswick Harbor that had been due to begin May 28.
In a lawsuit against the Corps filed on behalf of the group One Hundred Miles, the Southern Environmental Law Center argued dredging this time of year would harm endangered loggerhead sea turtles. The Corps historically has limited dredging to the winter months, when the turtles are not nesting.
In a brief filed last week, the Corps conceded that One Hundred Miles was likely to succeed in forcing the Corps to do more work to explain its reasons for wanting to change the dredging schedule.
“We are pleased that the court recognized what’s at stake here for Georgia’s protected loggerhead sea turtles,” said Catherine Ridley, coordinator for the St. Simons Island Sea Turtle Project and Vice President of Education and Communications at One Hundred Miles.
The Corps has said the plan is part of a more holistic effort to protect a larger number of endangered species in coastal waters, including the North Atlantic right whale that comes to the area for its calving season each year.
“The goal is to try to figure out how to do everything better for all the species,” Nicole Bonine, an environmental compliance sustainability and energy program manager for the Corps’ South Atlantic Division, said in March.
The Georgia coast is home to the oldest loggerhead sea turtle nesting project in the world, started in 1964 on Little Cumberland Island.
Left to right: Confederate President Jefferson Davis and Confederate Generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson are carved into the side of Stone Mountain. (Image from Stone Mountain Memorial Association proposals summary)
Proposals to add historical context around the Confederate carving at Stone Mountain are set to face a vote Monday amid calls to remove the controversial monument and backlash from its supporters.
The upcoming vote marks the first moves by the Stone Mountain Memorial Association to address longstanding outrage over the giant carving on the mountain’s side, which depicts Confederate President Jefferson Davis and Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson.
The proposals for an exhibit about the carving’s history as a post-Civil War memorial to the Confederacy and the removal of several Confederate flags to other areas of the park aim to balance passions on both sides of the issue and curb financial losses caused in part by the controversy, according to the association’s CEO, Bill Stephens.
“I believe you can’t cancel history and you can’t run from it,” Stephens said at an April 26 meeting in which he unveiled the proposals. “We believe in additions, not subtractions.”
The proposed exhibit for the carving would give an “honest telling of the whole story” on the mountain’s history as the site where the Ku Klux Klan was revived in 1915, as well as its significance as the world’s largest granite formation and “a gathering place since pre-history,” according to a summary of the proposals.
A set of flags including the Confederate battle emblem that stand beneath the 90-foot-tall carving would be relocated to a new site allowing “stronger identification with the carving and an ideal photo vantage point,” according to the proposals.
Additionally, the changes would include renaming the park’s Confederate Hall Historical and Environmental Education Center to “Heritage Hall,” revising the association’s logo to remove a depiction of the carving and building a new chapel on the mountain’s summit.
Support for adopting changes to how the park’s Confederate symbols are presented has been bolstered by the association’s new board leader, Rev. Abraham Mosley, who was tapped last month as the association’s first Black chairman.
“If these things are approved, we’re going with them,” Mosley said after last month’s meeting. “I want to see the whole story told. History is history. There’s the good, bad and the ugly.”
Critics and racial-justice advocates have long highlighted the carving’s origins as part of a push to erect Confederate monuments across the South during the Jim Crow era of segregation, when backers sought to promote the “Lost Cause” narrative of the Civil War and sweep away the influence of Reconstruction.
Early ideas for the carving came shortly before the Klan’s 1915 gathering on the mountain in which the hate group burned a large cross and formally launched its second founding, according to Todd Groce, president and CEO of the Georgia Historical Society.
The carving faced decades of delays until the 1954 landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education to outlaw separate-but-equal policies and desegregate schools sparked renewed interest in its completion, Groce said. The carving was finished in 1972.
“It’s part of a massive resistance at that point to desegregation,” Groce said in a recent interview. “There’s nothing related to Civil War history that happened there. … It’s really more about that Jim Crow era.”
Momentum to remove the carving has built in the years since a mass shooting at an African Methodist Episcopal church in Charleston, S.C., committed by a white gunman in 2015, followed by a wave of protests to take down Confederate statues and other symbols in several states across the South.
More than 100 Confederate monuments remained standing in cities and towns across Georgia as of 2019, according to tracking by the nonprofit advocacy group Southern Policy Law Center. A handful have been removed in the years since the Charleston church shooting.
Supporters of the carving’s removal face an uphill battle due to legislation Gov. Brian Kemp signed in 2019 that bans altering or relocating Confederate monuments on property owned by the state, including Stone Mountain. New legislation introduced by state Rep. Billy Mitchell, D-Stone Mountain, aims to repeal that law.
“Today is a time to act on the proposals that have been made and to go further,” Mitchell said at the April 26 meeting. “Those who do not learn from their history are doomed to repeat it. … [And] those who learn from their history and don’t make amends to the errors are just doomed.”
Meanwhile, opponents of changing the carving or adding educational context have dismissed the proposals, calling them attempts to erase history and the pride many Southerners take in their homes and heritage despite the old wounds of slavery, racism and war.
“Stone Mountain park by law is a memorial to the Confederacy,” said Martin O’Toole, a Marietta attorney and spokesman for the Sons of Confederate Veterans’ Georgia chapter. “It’s not the purpose to contextualize it. It’s not the purpose to talk about the Ku Klux Klan or other things like this.”
ATLANTA – An approach to teaching that emphasizes the existence of systemic racism in the United States that has caught the attention of the Biden administration is coming under attack in Georgia and other Republican-led states.
Gov. Brian Kemp sent a letter to the state Board of Education Thursday opposing the teaching of “critical race theory” in Georgia schools.
“It is ridiculous that the Biden administration is considering using taxpayer funds to push a blatantly partisan agenda in Georgia classrooms,” the governor wrote. “Parents, educators and local communities here in the Peach State know best how to educate their students – not the federal government.”
Critical race theory is also drawing fire from Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr, who has joined 19 other GOP attorneys general in opposition to a proposal by the U.S. Department of Education to prioritize critical race theory in the awarding of federal grants.
“I believe in history by addition, not history by revision,” Carr said. “This newly proposed rule would impose the flawed, radical teachings of critical race theory in Georgia’s schools. It must be rejected.”
The philosophical underpinning of critical race theory stems from The 1619 Project, developed by writers for The New York Times who believe the full history of Black Americans isn’t being told in U.S. classrooms. Critical race theory holds that racism is rooted in the nation’s history and continues today.
Conservative critics say the notion that the United States was founded on white supremacy and oppression is wrong.
