Georgia bill could 'inject chaos' into swing state election, civil rights advocates fear
Civil rights groups are warning that a bill that creates new rules for removing voters from the rolls could cause "chaos" in the key swing state of Georgia's election this year if it's signed by Gov. Brian Kemp.
Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office said the changes would provide clarity to county election officials who have been inundated with tens of thousands of voter registration challenges from Republican activists.
“It puts parameters around the challenge process,” Mike Hassinger, a spokesperson for Raffensperger, a Republican, said. “Whereas before it was wide open, and there was no language. You could challenge a voter at any time for any reason.”
The American Civil Liberties of Georgia says the proposed law is anything but clear.
“It’s possible that the intent of this bill was to provide clarity,” Cory Isaacson, the legal director of the ACLU of Georgia, said. “Unfortunately, that’s not what the end result of this bill does. We read it as generating a lot of confusion, a lot of inconsistency, and likely injecting chaos into this process right before the election cycle is about to begin.”
Both Republican-majority chambers of the Georgia legislature passed the multifaceted election bill on March 28. The bill would also make it easier for third-party candidates to get on the ballot in November. Other parts of the bill making changes to ballots and how they are counted would take effect after the election.
The measure's fate is now up to Kemp, a Republican who has rejected former President Donald Trump’s false claims of a stolen election in 2020. Kemp signed sweeping voting changes into law in 2021, at the height Trump's false claims. One of the provisions allowed voters to submit unlimited registration challenges.
Garrison Douglas, press secretary for Kemp, said the governor has 40 days to review bills. He did not say whether the governor would sign or veto it.
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The bill allows people to be taken off the rolls if they are registered at a nonresidential address. But starting in 2025, it requires homeless voters to register using the address of the elections office in the county where they live, and bans people from registering to vote using a post office box address or other private mailbox address.
Civil rights advocates see the apparent contradiction as a recipe for disenfranchising the homeless. (Georgia allows homeless voters to put the address where they usually stay, or show where they live on a map, according to the National Coalition for the Homeless.)
“On one hand, it’s telling people who are unhoused to register using the registrar’s office’s address, and on the other hand, later in the bill, it’s saying, ‘If you do that, that is evidence to sustain a voter challenge,’” said Isaacson of the ACLU.
Upon the bill's passage in the legislature, the ACLU of Georgia threatened to sue if Kemp signs it into law. “I think it’s inconsistent at best and sets people who are unhoused up to have their voter eligibility challenged at worst,” Isaacson said.
Amateur activists, who often question the results of the 2020 election, have been using public data to raise issues about people registered at now-defunct homeless shelters or who use business addresses on their voter registrations. Fulton County resident Jason Frazier, who has submitted thousands of voter challenges, told a Trump ally in 2023 about how he found people registered at UPS Stores.
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Raffensperger supports voter challenge definitions
The bill says there is probable cause to remove someone from the voter rolls if, for example, they are dead, registered to vote somewhere else, received a tax credit for living in another place, or registered at a nonresidential address.
Hassinger of the secretary of state's office said these definitions impose boundaries on citizen advocates who have been submitting voter challenges to county election officials and “making cases in their own ways.”
But Isaacson said the language doesn’t put a time limit on when someone was registered to vote somewhere else, so someone who voted in another state before moving to Georgia could be challenged for being registered in another state. "If you have voted in a different jurisdiction at any time in the past, does that establish probable use to sustain a voting challenge?” she asked.
Isaacson said the probable cause provisions “dramatically lower the standard” to kick people off the voter rolls. The National Voter Registration Act outlines specific processes for removing people from the rolls, which includes sending postcards to people to verify if their address has changed and waiting two presidential election cycles, or eight years, before removing them completely. She argues Georgia's law violates the National Voter Registration Act.
Republicans contend that the bill will actually reduce disenfranchisement by making clear when evidence is insufficient to sustain a challenge to a voter's registration. Hassinger pointed to a provision in the bill that specifically says the US Post Office’s National Change of Address database is not enough to remove someone from the voter rolls.
Previously, he said, “some people would come in with an [National Change of Address] spreadsheet or something they’d purchased from a commercial database," and local election officials didn't know whether that warranted removing the voter being challenged.
Hassinger said the bill "has to be considered by the governor’s office in its totality. This particular part of codifying the process of voter challenges, we’re OK with."
But critics pointed to a part of the bill that says proof of registration at a nonresidential address can be confirmed from “a government office, database, website, or publicly available sources derived solely from such governmental sources.”
Third party candidates, paper ballots, and QR codes
Another part of the bill allows candidates to get on the presidential ballot if they appear on the ballot in at least 20 other states. It would go into effect in July. Third-party candidates running in 2024, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., a scion of the storied Democratic family who is outspoken against vaccines, Cornel West, a left-wing scholar and civil rights activist, and Jill Stein, the perpetual candidate of the progressive Green Party.
Trump tends to perform better in polls that include third party candidates. A recent Quinnipiac poll showed President Joe Biden winning by three points in a head-to-head matchup with Trump, but losing by one point when third-party candidates were included.
Other parts of Georgia's bill would eliminate the use of QR codes to count printed ballots, require counties to count absentee votes faster on Election Day, and allow small counties to use paper ballots for elections. Those would go into effect after the election.
“Public trust in our elections should be of utmost concern for every elected official in Georgia,” State Sen. Max Burns, a Republican, said in a statement. “Removing QR codes from printed ballots is a powerful step forward to increase that trust and secure our state’s elections.”
State Rep. Saira Draper, a Democrat, told the Atlanta Journal Constitution: “There’s a very vocal minority out there who will never be confident in the process so long as their candidate is not the winner. I wish we had a policy of not passing laws to placate conspiracy theorists.”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Georgia voter challenge bill awaits Gov. Kemp's signature or veto