ATLANTA — Democrats reacted angrily to Gov. Brian Kemp’s call Wednesday to rewrite electoral district lines after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in April.
Kemp, a Republican, ordered a special legislative session for July 17 to redraw election maps after the high court ruled last month in Louisiana v. Callais that a new majority-Black legislative district in Louisiana was unconstitutional.
That raised questions about future legal interpretations of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965, which strengthened protections for Black and other minority voters by barring practices that diluted their votes.
Alabama, Louisiana, Tennessee and other Southern states moved to redraw district lines after the ruling.
Democrats in Georgia said Kemp’s decision to join the rush is further evidence that Republicans fear they can no longer win elections.
“When Republicans can’t win elections, they first lie about fraud,” Sen. Harold Jones II, D-Augusta, the Georgia Senate minority leader, said in a statement. “Then they beg Republican judges to save them from democracy’s verdict. Finally, they make new rules to help them win next time.”
He called Republicans “drunk-on-power bullies” who “don’t give a damn what voters want.”
Earlier this week, Kemp also signed House Bill 369, which will require five metro Atlanta counties — Clayton, Cobb, DeKalb, Fulton and Gwinnett — to hold nonpartisan elections for county commissioners, district attorney, and other county offices.
Democrats saw that as a move to undercut the increasing Democratic vote in those counties.
On April 1, Fulton County Commissioner Dana Barrett wrote Kemp asking him to veto the bill. Fulton commissioners hold undeniably partisan offices, she reasoned, since they both fund the county elections board and appoint members to it.
“Because our work absolutely has political implications, it is critical that voters understand the party affiliations of the county commissioners on their ballot,” she wrote.
Barrett noted that Kemp had rejected President Donald Trump’s call in 2020 to help overturn the election results in Georgia that had Trump narrowly losing to Joe Biden: “Governor, you stood up for the will of the people in 2020, I’m asking you to stand up for the will of the people again.”
The Georgia General Assembly’s failure to address a deadline of its own making played into Kemp’s decision. The special session he called is also supposed to address a July 1 deadline to stop using Quick Response (QR) barcodes when tallying votes in Georgia elections.
State Republicans created the deadline when they passed a 2024 law banning the QR codes. In the subsequent two legislative sessions, they did not adopt an alternative.
The death last month of U.S. Rep. David Scott, a metro Atlanta Democrat, triggered a special election in July, leaving little time to address the issue.
The Georgia House Democrats’ caucus issued a press release that accused Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, a GOP candidate for governor, of ensuring a special legislative session by failing to allow a vote on legislation that would have addressed the July 1 deadline.
The House passed a bill that would have moved that deadline back two years. The Senate did not vote on it as the legislative session came to an end in the early morning hours of April 3.
Now, the GOP is using the issue to justify a special legislative session, House Democrats said, adding that the rush before the upcoming elections illustrates why the Voting Rights Act was passed by Congress six decades ago.
“The speed and urgency that Republicans have moved to redraw maps to lock-in single-party rule, indefinitely, shows why the Voting Rights Act was needed in the first place,” the House Democrats wrote.
The QR code issue will not be an easy one to fix. Groups such as the Coalition for Good Governance have sued Georgia in the past over the way the state conducts elections. They contend that the voting machines violate federal and state laws that predate the 2024 law banning QR codes.
The Coalition recently petitioned the State Election Board to mandate the use of hand-marked paper ballots for the November general election. The board rejected the petition.
Local election officials have said that they do not have enough time to switch from the current digital system.
The Legislature will have even less time to address the issue when they meet in July.
“These things should have changed long ago,” said Marilyn Marks, executive director of the Coalition.
ATLANTA — Edwin Brant Frost IV faces a long stretch in prison and a demand to repay millions of dollars to investors after he pleaded guilty in federal court to wire fraud in connection with what prosecutors called a “classic” Ponzi scheme.
The plea agreement signed Tuesday by Frost, the former owner and president of the defunct First Liberty Building and Loan, estimated the loss at somewhere between $65 million and $150 million.
“The Defendant agrees to pay full restitution, plus applicable interest” to the victims, said the document, which Frost signed in court before U.S. District Judge Leigh Martin May of the Northern District of Georgia.
Assistant U.S. Attorneys Angela Adams and Samir Kaushal handled the case, and are recommending 14 years in prison. The maximum for the crime is 20 years.
U.S. Attorney Theodore S. Hertzberg and Adams filed a wire fraud charge against Frost on April 23. They alleged that he violated the law when he wired money between First Liberty accounts in November 2023, well after the company was underwater financially.
By 2021, the court document said, First Liberty had ceased generating enough revenue to pay the interest it owed investors, so Frost recruited new investors and used their money to pay the interest.
Frost went on to raise at least $140 million from at least 300 investors, the court record said, and paid himself and his family over $5 million. Examples given of his use of investor money included $230,000 to rent a vacation home in Maine, $140,000 on jewelry and $2 million on credit card bills.
Frost also used investor funds to make $570,000 in political contributions, the prosecutors wrote.
Frost and his family were major donors to Republicans. His son, Brant Frost V, was chairman of the Coweta County Republican Party.
In July, after the federal Securities and Exchange Commission sued First Liberty alleging it had operated as a Ponzi scheme while donating money to political campaigns, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger asked recipients to return any contributions.
Later that month, state GOP Chairman Josh McKoon announced that his party had delivered $36,844.
Last month, Raffensperger said a bank associated with First Liberty had pledged to repay nearly $6.7 million to 46 investors.
As part of his plea deal, Frost agreed to cooperate with any further investigations or court proceedings. He is to be sentenced in Judge May’s courtroom in Newnan on Aug. 14.
ATLANTA — Georgia lawmakers will return to the state Capitol on June 17 to contend with two election-related issues under an order signed Wednesday by Gov. Brian Kemp.
The proclamation requires the General Assembly to convene for a special session to consider redrawing legislative districts, pointing to a U.S. Supreme Court decision in April that invalidated a new majority-Black legislative district in Louisiana.
The order also calls on the Legislature to address a lingering problem with the state’s voting process.
Georgia’s current voting process will become illegal July 1 under a 2024 state law that banned the use of Quick Response barcodes, known as QR codes, for tallying votes. Despite meeting for two regular legislative sessions since passing that law, state lawmakers have neither authorized nor funded an alternative process.
The death last month of U.S. Rep. David Scott, a metro Atlanta Democrat, triggered a special election in July, leaving little time to address the issue.
Kemp’s proclamation calls lawmakers to the Gold Dome at 2 p.m. on June 17, the day after any necessary runoff elections to decide the outcome of the May 19 primary elections.
By then, some lawmakers who return to the Capitol will know that they lost and will be out of office next year.
They will be redrawing election maps without the same limitations previously imposed by the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which strengthened protections for Black and other minority voters by barring practices that diluted their votes.
In April, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Louisiana v. Callais that a new majority-Black legislative district was unconstitutional, raising questions about future legal interpretations of the Voting Rights Act. Lawmakers in several Southern states moved to redraw district lines after the ruling.
ATLANTA — State lawmakers passed a budget that was about $1 billion larger than what Gov. Brian Kemp expects Georgia will collect in tax revenue next fiscal year, so he took a scalpel to their spending plan.
The fiscal year 2027 budget he signed Tuesday trims $300 million from spending that the General Assembly had added.
“They may not be happy, but they also realize we’ve got a hole in the budget that we’ve got to fix,” Kemp said, before signing House Bill 974, which will govern spending starting in July.
The Legislature passed a $38.5 billion budget, but Kemp told reporters that revenue estimates for next year are only $36.6 billion. Part of the reason: income tax cuts that lawmakers passed in the waning hours of their legislative session and that Kemp signed into law Monday.
Richard Dunn, director of the Governor’s Office of Planning and Budget, said Georgia now has a $1.3 billion “structural deficit.”
Gov. Brian Kemp signs the fiscal year 2027 budget (House Bill 974) in his office at the Georgia Capitol in Atlanta on Tuesday, May 12, 2026, as his wife Marty and Richard Dunn, director of the Governor’s Office of Planning and Budget, watch.
He said Kemp’s cutbacks will address $300 million of the excess spending and that growth in revenue should take care of much of the rest. The state will likely have to dip into its surplus to fill whatever gap remains, he added.
That amount can change depending on the rate of economic growth.
“The state must now address a reduction in revenue for the coming fiscal year of nearly $1 billion,” Kemp said, “and that’s assuming we don’t have an economic downturn.”
The income tax cuts, which Kemp embraced, tipped his budget off balance.
On Monday, Kemp signed House Bill 463, which rolled back the income tax rate to 4.99% from 5.19% for the current year.
It also waived income tax on the first $1,750 of overtime pay and cash tips, retroactive to the beginning of the year, and it increased by $5,000 the amount of excluded retirement income for those 65 and older.
But that new law is designed to continue cutting the tax rate if state revenues remain strong, reducing the rate by another percentage point over eight years, to 3.99%. The rate is scheduled to fall 0.125 percentage points (an eighth of a point) next year.
HB 463 also increased the dependent and standard deductions by 25% this year and calls for gradually increasing both by that same amount over eight years, depending on the same revenue triggers as the tax rate cuts.
The standard deduction for single filers rose to $15,000 from $12,000 when Kemp signed HB 463. It is scheduled to go up another $375 next year, ultimately reaching $18,000. The amounts are doubled for couples filing jointly. The dependent deduction rose to $5,000 from $4,000 and would top out at $6,000 after eight years of steady increases.
ATLANTA — More taxpayers will be able to contribute to a private school scholarship fund while receiving a state tax credit for the full amount after Gov. Brian Kemp signed House Bill 328 Monday.
The measure increases the aggregate cap on tax-credited contributions to organizations that distribute scholarships to attend private K-12 schools or to pay for homeschool costs.
The annual cap was $120 million. It rises to $150 million.
Kemp signed the measure at the Capitol along with other tax measures Monday.
HB 328 also relaxes requirements for to obtain the scholarships, which are generally available only to those who attend a low-performing public school.
Now, students from military families and those with intellectual or developmental disabilities can obtain a scholarship without enrolling in a low-performing public school.
