Election Law Restricts Absentee Voting, Weakens Sec. of State

ATLANTA — Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp on Thursday signed sweeping Republican-sponsored election reform into law that made good on promises to restrict absentee voting.

Primary changes will eliminate signature matching for absentee voting and instead require state-issued ID’s or ID numbers for eligibility verification.

This move could scale back the historic voter turnout Georgia witnessed in the November 2020 election that flipped Georgia to a blue state that carried President Joe Biden to the White House and led former President Donald Trump to stoke false claims of election fraud. And

Democrats and voting rights groups complained that the bill would disproportionately disenfranchise voters of color, some of who are among more than 200,000 without any form of state identification.

Signing the bill less than two hours after its final passage along party lines in both chambers — 34-20 in the Senate and 100-75 in the House, according to the Associated Press — Kemp signaled that the new law was a remedy to troubles for which his administration was criticized during the election.

“After the November election last year, I knew, like so many of you, that significant reforms to our state elections were needed,” he said after the signing ceremony. “There is no doubt that there were many alarming issues with how the elections were handled. And those problems understandably led to the crisis of confidence in the ballot box here in Georgia.”

Kemp said the new law would “make it easy to vote and hard to cheat.”

Before Kemp signed the bill Stacy Abrams, who challenged Kemp in a closely fought 2018 gubernatorial race and helped orchestrate Democratic wins in November and again in a sweep of the January U.S. Senate runoffs, questioned the speed with which the companion bills were signed into law.

“To avoid actual analysis,” Abrams said in a Twitter message retweeting the post from FairFight CEO Laren Groh-Wargo.

One of the biggest changes gives the GOP-controlled legislature more control over election administration, a change that has raised concerns among voting rights groups that it could lead to greater partisan influence.

The law replaces the elected secretary of state as the chair of the state election board with a new appointee of the legislature after Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger rebuffed Trump's attempts to overturn Georgia's election results. It also allows the board to remove and replace county election officials deemed to be underperforming.

That provision is widely seen as something that could be used to target Fulton County, a Democratic stronghold covering most of Atlanta, which came under fire after long lines plagued primary elections over the summer.

Republican Rep. Barry Fleming, a driving force in crafting the law, said that provision would only be a “temporary fix, so to speak, that ends and the control is turned back over to the locals after the problems are resolved.”

Drop boxes for absentee ballots will now be located inside county or government buildings designated as early voting sites, limiting access to times when those facilities are open, and thus, the usefulness of the drop boxes, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Also, voters won’t have access to drop boxes in the last four days of an election, when mailing in ballots on time may be impossible.

The law also reduces the timeframe in which runoff elections are held, including the amount of early voting for runoffs. And it bars outside groups from handing out food or water to people standing in line to vote.

One contentious measure dropped from original legislation was the abolishment of the “Souls to the Polls” Sunday voting popular with Black voters. The law makes two Sunday early voting days “optional” along with two “mandatory” Saturdays for early voting.

As Kemp was delivering remarks shortly after signing the bill, he was interrupted by a commotion inside his ceremonial office and asked an aide “what's the problem” before a livestream of the event cut out.

Just outside Kemp's office were about 10 protestors, including Democratic state Reps. Park Cannon and Erica Thomas, both African Americans. Cannon was arrested by Capitol police after knocking on the door of the governor’s office during his remarks.

Author and Mother Jones writer Ari Berman tweeted footage of Cannon being removed from the Gold Dome.

About 50 protesters including representatives from the NAACP gathered across from the Capitol building Thursday in opposition.

During the rally, Bishop Reginald Jackson of the African Methodist Episcopal Church called for a boycott of Coca-Cola Co. products.

Jackson, who leads more than 400 churches across Georgia, said the Atlanta-based soft drink company had failed to live up to the commitments it made last year to support the Black Lives Matter movement by not forcefully opposing the voting bills pushed by Republicans.

“We took them at his word,” he said of Coca-Cola CEO James Quincey. “Now, when they try to pass this racist legislation, we can’t get him to say anything.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.