UPDATE: This post has been updated with a lot of new information and an interview — see below!
Not content to be a deeply unpopular near-billionaire, Kelly Loeffler is starting her own voter suppression group in Georgia, which has already been dubbed “Unfair Fight” by critics. It likely presages another run for Senate in 2022, since she knows that she can’t win without cheating.
To justify the future actions of her “grassroots” group, she’s citing the impact that her lying has had on the electorate:
“We had unprecedented changes to our election laws in 2020 because of the pandemic,” Loeffler said. “And we need to take a really hard look at the impact of those changes and why it drove trust in our elections so far down.”
Thankfully, we have Stacey Abrams and Fair Fight going to bat for voting rights. Abrams did not give some smug, mealy-mouthed answer when asked about Loeffler — she went and released a blistering statement:
“It’s deeply disheartening that a former U.S. Senator would spend her time and her resources to publicly engage in the type of conspiracy theories that say that only certain Americans should be valued and have their votes counted. That’s what Kelly Loeffler is proposing. But I can’t be surprised. She accepted the support of Marjorie Taylor Greene, a QAnon conspiracy theorist, because in her mind, winning at all costs is more important than protecting the United States and the fundamentals of our democracy.”
Loeffler’s embrace of Trump’s lies helped embolden the local GOP, which is in the middle of setting up an arduous gauntlet that will make it tough for anyone without a personal assistant or a ridiculous amount of free time to vote. The state Senate passed its first suppression bill on Tuesday, which brings the state one step closer to requiring voter ID (either a photocopy of a state ID or the special number on the back of a card) to vote via absentee ballot.
It also introduced a big new omnibus bill that’s jam-packed some of the worst policy proposals, including ending at-will absentee voting and limiting drop boxes.
The House is also assaulting absentee balloting and early voting. It backed off on the explicitly racist banning of Sunday voting (aka Souls to the Polls), but it’s still pushing a multi-faceted attack on democracy. Some of its headline components include:
- Photo ID requirements to request absentee ballots (not just a serial number, but an actual photocopy of an ID) and return absentee ballots,
- A witness requirement on absentee ballots
- Restriction on ballot drop boxes,
- Reduced time to request and return absentee ballots,
- Limited set times for early voting
UPDATE: The GOP continues to push new bills and, largely in the early morning hours still. To make sense of the situation and get the latest on what’s happening, I spoke tonight with Sara Tindall Ghazal, the Georgia Democratic Party’s first full-time Voter Protection Director (and former Progressives Everywhere endorsee), who laid it all out for me.
The entire interview is up at my newsletter, and I may publish the entire thing at Daily Kos tomorrow, but here’s one important answer I wanted to share:
So how many voters overall do you think would be impacted by these changes?
The Democratic Party did a really good analysis based on voting behavior in November and in January, it was more than two million voters who would be affected by these changes.
Now another change that I wish had gotten more attention and I’d like to raise the profile on is eliminating out-of-precinct provisional ballots, discarding them and saying that they can't be counted. And the reason that that one is so particularly egregious is that it has a hugely disparate impact. It affects voters who live in urban areas whose precincts change more often, or the district lines change more often, or whose Election Day precinct may or may not be where an early voting location is. And so it's very confusing for them.
The numbers are very, very clear. Twice as many Democrats voted out of precinct on provisional ballots than Republicans, and that's what we've got on data going back about eight years. Nobody wants to vote on a provisional ballot because everyone knows that some of those votes might not count. But this is a voter’s absolute last opportunity to have their vote counted. They arrange for another Saturday or a Monday or some other time to vote. They can't say, “well, my absentee ballot never made it, I can go vote in person.” If that provisional ballot is rejected, through no fault of that voters’ fault, they're disenfranchised utterly.
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