by Ty Tagami | Aug 30, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp threw his full support behind football coach Derek Dooley on Saturday, saying he believes the son of legendary Bulldogs coach Vince Dooley can unseat Democrat Jon Ossoff from the U.S. Senate next year.
“I am proud to endorse Derek Dooley, for United States Senate,” the two-term Republican governor said Saturday. “Derek is a fighter, a leader we can trust, and a true political outsider who has what it takes to defeat Jon Ossoff and make sure our state finally has a voice in the U.S. Senate that reflects our values.”
Kemp held his first public event for Dooley outside the University of Georgia’s Sanford Stadium before the Bulldogs routed Marshall University’s Thundering Herd 45-7.
Dooley, a political newcomer, said he hoped to bring Kemp’s conservative leadership style to Washington by beating Ossoff in November.
First, he will have to get through two GOP congressmen also competing for the GOP nomination.
U.S. Rep. Buddy Carter, R-St. Simons, was the first major political figure to jump into the race followed by U.S. Rep. Mike Collins, R-Jackson.
Both have aligned themselves with President Donald Trump, trying to win his potent base of support in the Republican primary.
Democrats responded by attacking Dooley’s record as a former coach for the University of Tennessee, calling him “failed and fired.” They also referenced the troubled history between Kemp and Trump.
The Georgia Democrats said Kemp’s endorsement “is fanning the flames of an already chaotic GOP U.S. Senate primary and guaranteeing a showdown between himself and Trump that could be worse than Dooley’s job-ending 2012 loss to Vanderbilt.”
by Ty Tagami | Aug 29, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — Gov. Brian Kemp will promote Derek Dooley‘s bid to dislodge Democrat Jon Ossoff from the U.S. Senate by appearing with the Republican candidate Saturday before the University of Georgia game against Marshall University at Sanford Stadium.
The football coach and son of legendary Bulldogs coach and athletic director Vince Dooley formally entered the GOP primary in early August after floating the idea in June.
U.S. Rep. Buddy Carter, R-St. Simons, was the first major political figure to jump into the race followed by U.S. Rep. Mike Collins, R-Jackson.
Both have voting records aligned with President Donald Trump and his supporters, and Democrats have attacked them for it.
Dooley, a political newcomer, has no such record. So Democrats have been targeting his mainstream marketing, with Georgia Democratic Party Chair Charlie Bailey labeling him as a “failed and fired” former coach for the University of Tennessee.
Kemp, who is among a handful of politicians authorized by a 2021 state law to operate a “leadership committee” that can raise unlimited sums, will play on the popularity of Georgia football to help Dooley.
A spokesperson for Kemp said the governor will stand with Dooley while tailgating ahead of Saturday’s game. It will be their first public speaking engagement together for Dooley’s Senate campaign.
by Ty Tagami | Aug 28, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — Members of the Republican-controlled State Election Board offered differing views on election security Thursday when lawmakers held their third of six listening sessions around the state.
Board members also disagreed about whether there is a problem.
“We can count our votes accurately on Election Day and we can trust the results,” board Chairman John Fervier said. Last year, he said, all 5.3 million ballots were scanned by an optical reader during an audit that found only 87 discrepancies, all but one due to human error during the counting of hand-marked ballots.
“That’s an incredible result that you would hope would silence a lot of the conspiracy theorists and naysayers that cause confusion by claiming that Georgia’s elections are rigged and unfair,” said Fervier, who was appointed to the board by Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican.
But Janelle King, another Republican appointee on the board, pointed to problematic elections, such as one in DeKalb County in 2022 when a candidate lost election to a seat on the county commission only to win after a hand recount. Technical errors in scanners caused the initial miscount.
“Ask DeKalb Commissioner Michelle Long Spears if technology is reliable,” said King, who was appointed to the board last year by state House Speaker Jon Burns, a Republican from Newington. “So, it’s not to say that technology is all bad, but to assume that technology doesn’t fail is inaccurate. And to make people who feel like technology should not be the sole purpose out to be quacks or crazy, it’s just completely absurd.”
Raffensperger’s office disagreed with King’s account, saying after the hearing that she had misrepresented what happened in the Dekalb election. Human error — “a programming issue” — caused the technology problem that caused the miscount, a spokesman for the Secretary of State’s Office said.
“The ballots and the scanners were not synced properly. That’s user error, not the machine’s fault,” Robert Sinners said. “If I microwave something for 20 minutes and it explodes, is that the microwave’s fault?” He added that it was “so sad seeing people who have the correct information blatantly ignoring it as the alternative fits their narrative better.”
King, like several who testified at the hearing at North Georgia Technical College in Clarkesville, wants paper ballots. Paper is likely coming because the legislature outlawed the QR code readers now used by the Dominion voting machines. Georgia elections must be conducted without those digital codes starting in July.
Those pushing for change also argued that the board should get more taxpayer dollars to pay for investigators and technology systems, so it does not have to rely on Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office.
Lawmakers stripped Raffensperger of his role on the board, known as the SEB, after President Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, and Raffensperger rebuffed Trump’s demand to find him more votes.
Brad Carver, a metro Atlanta district chairman of the state Republican Party, testified for a third time Thursday, having presented to lawmakers at both prior meetings, in Atlanta in July and in Rockmart in early August.
The election board needs more staff and its own attorney to make local election officials comply with the law and to clear a backlog of election-related complaints, said Carver, who also advocated for paper ballots.
“You have county election boards that are not following the law. They’re continuing to not follow the law. And the way that we can ensure uniform application is to have the SEB enforce that if you give them the appropriate authority,” said Carver.
His evidence of problems was a slide he showed that indicated 104% of voting-age Georgians were registered to vote. Carver did not have an answer when a Republican lawmaker on the panel asked if the number of voters in the numerator included those purged or about to be purged because they had not voted in years.
Then Rep. Saira Draper, D-Atlanta, pounced.
If 104% of eligible Georgians had voted, Carver would have brought that statistic, she said.
“That would have been a red flag of something going wrong. This in and of itself is completely explained by the inactive slash active voter process,” she said, suggesting that Carver was “fear mongering” with misleading statistics.
The meeting revealed deep personal divisions on the board, with its recently hired executive director, James W. Mills, publicly excoriating Fervier, who is technically one of his bosses.
“After almost 30 years of being in and out of the state, I’ve never served under a more dysfunctional, dishonest chairman than Chairman John Fervier,” said Mills, 62, a former state representative and member of the State Board of Pardons and Paroles who has been in his new role for a few months.
Draper later called that attack embarrassing, saying she felt like she was at home managing fights between kids. She also questioned whether Mills had the requisite expertise for his new job, and he responded that nearly two decades of running for office was experience enough.
The House Election Procedures Study Committee will hold another hearing on Sept. 18 at Savannah Tech.
UPDATE: This article was amended with comment from the Georgia Secretary of State’s office
by Ty Tagami | Aug 27, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — A generation of children are reaping what the technology industry sowed when it merged smartphones with social media, and the results have spurred calls for regulation.
That is what motivated state senators on Wednesday to hold the first of a series of hearings about the impact of social media and artificial intelligence on children and what to do about it.
The bipartisan committee was authorized by Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, a Republican running for governor. He backed a new law that sought to limit social media companies’ access to children, but it is tied up in court.
So children remain targets for social media platforms and application designers, said several experts and lawmakers who spoke at the hearing at the Capitol.
The committee is jointly helmed by a Democrat and a Republican. The Democratic co-chair, Sen. Sally Harrell, D-Atlanta, opened the meeting with an anecdote about raising her own kids as “guinea pigs” in the new technology environment, and how they had become glued to their devices.
It disrupted family dinners and caused them to lose interest in going outdoors and reading books, she said. But the impact she saw was comparatively minor: three people testified Wednesday that their children committed suicide because of social media.
Sharon Winkler said her son left a note explaining why he had taken his own life: he had gone to an online platform for solace after a breakup with his girlfriend but was instead met with bullying.
“We have to hold these technology companies accountable,” Winkler said.
The question is how.
Georgia’s General Assembly has already tried. The Protecting Georgia’s Children on Social Media Act sailed into law with broad bipartisan support last year. It was a top priority for Jones, but tech companies sued and have stopped the measure for now.
A federal judge for the Northern District of Georgia ruled in June that the industry-backed plaintiff in the case was likely to prevail on claims that the law violates the First Amendment’s speech protections.
The plaintiff, a group called NetChoice, represents a who’s who of social media companies, including Instagram, YouTube and X. The group contended the law went too far by requiring everyone to prove their age and identity to access their platforms, forcing adults to turn over personal information.
The law required companies to “make commercially reasonable efforts” verify users are at least 16 — or obtain parent consent. It also regulated advertising to children.
Experts who testified Wednesday said rulings by other courts suggest a path forward, with several saying states have the authority to require companies to set privacy defaults at the strictest level rather than making them wide open from the start. Parents generally are too busy or lack the knowhow to fiddle with such settings, they said.
Winkler was among many who testified that tech companies face no significant regulatory limits on application and platform designs that addict children, even toddlers. The lawmakers were given copies of the 2024 book, “The Anxious Generation,” by psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who dissects such designs and the resulting impact.
The committee will meet several more times through the rest of this year before formally recommending new legislation. Harrell said the next meeting, on Sept. 17, will offer a detailed look at age-verification laws and explore regulatory approaches to “manipulative” algorithms.
Her co-chair, Sen. Shawn Still, R-Johns Creek, said the issue was non-partisan, which makes some kind of legislation likely.
“It’s a societal issue,” he said, “and we’ve got to solve this together.”
by Ty Tagami | Aug 27, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — When Georgia lawmakers asked what they could do to make the lives of educators a little easier, they got a predictable response: stop telling us what to do, especially if you will not pay for it.
The first hearing Tuesday of a House study committee on reducing mandates for public school administrators revealed concerns about an old law that mandates high-stakes testing, an even older state funding formula that has not kept up with costs, and two new laws.
The Early Literacy Act passed two years ago is an unfunded mandate that has forced school districts to cut back in key areas to pay for teacher retraining and new curriculum, said Mack Bullard, the superintendent in Twiggs County.
Technology does not get upgraded, he said. Fine arts, clubs and sports that keep students connected to school get cut. Safety improvements and facility repairs get skipped. And teachers do not get paid a competitive salary, leading to attrition.
“Every dollar we redirect to cover an unfunded mandate is a dollar that we take away from another essential service,” Bullard told the panel, which convened in Warner Robins for a livestreamed meeting.
There were also complaints about Georgia’s Quality Basic Education funding formula from the 1980s. It pays an average $18.75 per day for substitute teachers in Houston County, said Chris Brown, the deputy superintendent there. The $17,452 per year for secretaries does not cover their health insurance, which exceeds $22,000 annually, let alone their pay, he added.
Brown also pointed to the 2024 law giving students a $6,500 annual voucher if they leave a public school to attend a private one.
Those private schools do not have to face the same accountability measures as public schools, Brown said.
Rep. Shaw Blackmon, R-Bonaire, leads the committee. He said the concerns deserve further discussion. He said the next hearing will be Sept. 29.
