1. Georgia has more competitive GOP primaries this year than in 2018 - of course turnout will be up. 2. Early voting is not necessarily indicative of overall voting trends (as Dems learned in both 2016 and 2020). 3. Early voting relative to election-day voting is a growing trend across the country every year. 4. The problem with GA laws are that it makes it more difficult or more obnoxious for *certain* voters. So overall turnout is irrelevant if it turnout is up amongst a group that still has it easy and is lower amongst a group that has it harder. 5. Many of the problems with the GA law relate to long lines on election day, so that likely drives some early voting increases as well. We won't know much about the impact of the GA law until after there's been time to analyze turnout after the election. Anyone who's trying to make claims now has a partisan goal rather than an interest in facts or data.
Voting is surging in Georgia despite controversial new election law Tuesday’s primary is the first big test of the legislation, which was opposed by voting rights groups and Democrats. https://www.washingtonpost.com/poli...orgia-despite-controversial-new-election-law/
Let's hope voters in Georgia don't run up against the barriers to voting that caused over 12% of Texas primary mail-in ballots, 24,000 votes, to get tossed under new GOP voting rules. TEXAS 2022 ELECTIONS More than 12% of mail-in ballots were rejected in Texas under new GOP voting rules, final tally shows Figures released by the Texas secretary of state show that more than 24,000 Texas voters had their ballots rejected in the March primary. The rejection rate is a significant increase over previous elections. BY ALEXA URA APRIL 6, 2022UPDATED: 2 PM CENTRAL https://www.texastribune.org/2022/04/06/texas-mail-in-ballot-rejection-voting/
If Georgia's Election Law Was Supposed To Suppress the Vote, It Sure Did a Bad Job After bracing for a supposed return of Jim Crow, Georgia saw a major increase in early votes in this week's primaries. https://reason.com/2022/05/25/if-ge...d-to-suppress-the-vote-it-sure-did-a-bad-job/
It's also true that Obama was the best gun salesperson that the US has ever had because of propaganda on the right. However in this case there is proof that Republican's do want to make it harder for you to vote at the very least, and in alot of cases just outright throw out votes they don't like. I mean do you want me to talk about the new candidates running for Secretary of State as MAGA Republicans actively campaigning on having the ability to overturn elections?? Or how about the Republicans on the Supreme Court's own family actively working with State legislators to overturn elections??? https://www.azmirror.com/2022/05/20...lick-for-help-overturning-bidens-arizona-win/ So let's cut the bullsh$t about Republicans ACTUALLY NOT wanting to meddle with elections by picking their voters or flat out throwing out votes. You don't need a FoxNews type of propaganda machine to create that narrative. Hell... why not just listen to Donald Trump himself. But yes... voting is at an all time high, and has been increasing in the Trump era. People being scared that we are losing our democracy, losing a woman's right to choose, losing voting abilities, and have a party that is owned by the NRA who loves a good mass shooting to scare people into buying more guns does tend to motivate people to get off their a$$es. That still doesn't make what the Republicans are doing any better.
*WHO* is voting is the question. Total votes. . . .versus the votes of the people the law is meant to suppress Rocket River
https://www.wsj.com/articles/joe-bi...abrams-11668035286?mod=hp_opin_pos_6#cxrecs_s Biden’s ‘Jim Crow 2.0’ Dies in Georgia Voter turnout in the state exceeds the record of 2018, with no report of problems. By The Editorial Board Nov. 9, 2022 6:52 pm ET Control of the House and Senate still hangs in the balance, but one Tuesday result was clear: President Biden’s “Jim Crow 2.0” rhetoric about state voting laws was a nasty political distortion. The Georgia Secretary of State website reports that by Wednesday afternoon’s counting, 3,957,880 voters had cast a ballot in Tuesday’s election, slightly higher than the vote total in 2018—which was historic. The percentage of registered voters casting ballots dipped slightly, though that’s likely owing to the striking 520,000 increase in voter registration over the past four years. Georgia also banked record early turnout, far exceeding 2018, and coming very near to rivaling early turnout in the 2020 presidential election. Compare this to Mr. Biden’s warning in Atlanta in January that Georgia’s 2021 election reform was “Jim Crow 2.0.” He claimed it was intended to accomplish “two insidious things: voter suppression and election subversion.” He said the new law made it harder to vote by mail or drop box, with the clear goal of “longer lines at the polls.” He also warned of “threats” and intimidation against election officials, and sowed doubt about future election outcomes, since the law made voting about “who gets to count the vote and whether your vote counts at all.” This falsehood caused the CEOs of Delta and Coca-Cola to attack the law and Major League Baseball to yank it’s All Star Game from Atlanta. What the law really did is increase electoral integrity and voting options. It expanded weekend early voting statewide; formalized the use of drop boxes (not allowed prior to 2020); left in place no-excuse absentee voting; and ended subjective signature matching—to minimize the number of rejected absentee ballots. All this worked to make voting—including early voting—easier, as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution admitted in a piece that began: “Voters found out Tuesday that it’s possible to have both high turnout and short lines,” adding that “no one reported threats or illegal behavior at polling places.” As for the counting, Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock leads Herschel Walker as they head to a Senate runoff. Do Democrats doubt that result? Stacey Abrams lost her rematch with Gov. Brian Kemp by so much that she couldn’t cite voter suppression as an excuse, as she did in 2018 without evidence. In the aftermath of 2020, some 19 states passed election reforms to increase confidence in the voting process, after Democrats used the pandemic to impose last-minute rule changes that helped sow distrust. From the early reports of solid turnout and orderly counting, it appears to have worked. Mr. Biden and his “Jim Crow” jeerers owe them an apology.
What happened to the idea of policy and winning an election based on whose ideas and visions are considered better? The GOP today is a party of election deniers who are paranoid. https://www.propublica.org/article/georgia-election-board-vote-certification Election Deniers Secretly Pushed Rule That Would Make It Easier to Delay Certification of Georgia’s Election Results On Monday, the GOP-controlled State Election Board is poised to adopt the rule, which would potentially allow county officials, including one who secretly backed the rule, to throw the election results of the swing state into chaos this fall. A former Fulton County election official who submitted an initial draft of the rule told ProPublica that she had done so at the behest of a regional leader of a right-wing organization involved in challenging the legitimacy of American election systems. That organization, the Election Integrity Network, is led by Cleta Mitchell, who helped orchestrate attempts to overturn the 2020 election and spoke on the call in which former President Donald Trump demanded that Georgia’s secretary of state “find” him 11,780 votes to undo Joe Biden’s victory. The Election Integrity Network’s role in bringing forward the proposed rule has not been previously reported. The new rule is even more concerning, election experts said, because it requires county boards to investigate discrepancies between the number of ballots cast and the number of people who voted in a precinct, no matter how minor. It bars counties from certifying the election tallies until officials can review an investigation of every precinct with inconsistent totals. Such inconsistencies are commonplace, not evidence of malfeasance, and only in extremely rare circumstances affect the outcome of elections. The requirement to explain every one of them and litigation around investigations into them could take far longer than the time allowed by law to certify. “If this rule is adopted, any claims of fraud, any claims of discrepancies, could be the basis for a county board member — acting in bad faith — to say, ‘I’m not confident in the results,’ and hold up certification under the flimsiest of pretexts,” said Ben Berwick, who leads the election law and litigation team of Protect Democracy, a nonprofit that works to protect the integrity of American elections. “The bottom line here,” Berwick said, is that “election deniers are intentionally creating a failure point in the process where they can interfere if they don’t like the results of an election.”
It's going fine in GA. Raffensperger: Election board ‘destroying voter confidence’ in Georgia - CSMonitor.com Georgia’s Republican secretary of state is warning that last-minute election rule changes implemented by his state’s election board are creating unnecessary confusion and undermining voter trust in one of the United States’ most hotly contested presidential battlegrounds. Republican Brad Raffensperger famously declined to grant then-President Donald Trump’s demand that he “find 11,780 votes” to reverse his 2020 loss in the state. He’s since backed controversial voting law changes decried by Democrats, defeated a Trump-backed primary challenger in 2022, and crisscrossed the state trying to convince voters that his state’s elections will be safer and more secure than ever before, including changes he says should ensure a smooth vote count. But a hard-right majority gained control of Georgia’s State Election Board in May. In recent weeks that board has passed controversial rule changes. Just days ago, it approved a new rule requiring all ballots be counted by hand to make sure they match machine counts, a time-consuming and error-prone process that could delay the tabulation of votes on election night. The Monitor sat down with Secretary of State Raffensperger in his office in the Georgia state Capitol in Atlanta on Tuesday afternoon to talk about his work and his concerns about the board. Here’s what he had to say about the looming elections. The transcript has been condensed and edited for clarity. Do you feel like the members who make up the majority governing Georgia’s State Election Board understand how elections work? No, I don’t think they do. And the only way to understand how elections work is to volunteer to be a poll worker. It’s as easy as that. Once you’ve worked one election, you start understanding, “Oh, they’ve got this procedure to close that gate [to potential voting fraud].” These people don’t know what to look for. So any great conspiracy theory they hear, they buy into it. Do you think these election board members are operating in bad faith? (Mr. Raffensperger pauses for nine seconds.) That’s a long pause. I think they’re living in the past. They’re fighting the wrong battle, because we’ve already [responded to] many of these concerns that everyone had. The ballot storage boxes now are defined where they’ll be and how many there’ll be per county. You got one for every 100,000 voters. We also now have voter ID. All the early voting [now] has to be reported no later than one hour after polls close, so 8 p.m. So all you’re waiting for now is the 30% to 35% that could have been cast on Election Day. And we want to make sure we have constant updates from the counties. Everything that they’ve done with their rules and regulations slows down the process. We’re serious when we say “free, fair, and fast.” And what they’re doing is just throwing a wrench into the works. How big a wrench do you think this is? What sort of delay might we be looking at for reporting results? The counties have already expressed how long they think it’ll take. It could be 1 o’clock to 4 o’clock [a.m.]. But once one starts getting to 3 or 4 o’clock, that’s the triple witching hour. “Oh, is this the same thing that happened in Philadelphia in 2020, in Detroit in 2020?” Everything we’ve done is to shore up voters’ confidence – and everything that they’re doing is destroying voter confidence. It’s just a breeding ground for conspiracy theories. Which of the new rules are you most concerned about? Every one of them oversteps what is already in state law. We think that a court will find that they’re null and void. The [Republican] attorney general, in a six-page letter of advisement, laid it all out. We had a two-page letter. But they’re bound and determined to do what they want to do. You spent the past four years working to try and make sure that this post-election period would not look like what we saw in 2020. How much will the election board’s new rules undermine that effort? What they’re doing is actually very detrimental. Because [a winning candidate will say] “I won in spite of all the stuff that you guys were doing to us,” and if the candidate loses, “Well, you know, the rules disfavored me.” And so it’s not helpful for the republic. People need to understand, and particularly conservatives need to understand: Georgia is ranked by The Heritage Foundation, a hard-right think tank, No. 2 for election integrity. Can I say that again? We are ranked No. 2 by The Heritage Foundation. I’m sure they probably got blowback from a lot of people, saying, “How is that possible?” Because they did their work.
As the SoS of GA told the GA election board, just stop it, it was illegal. Judge strikes down Trump-backed Georgia election board rule changes | Courthouse News Service ATLANTA (CN) — A judge on Wednesday invalidated seven new controversial election rules imposed by the Georgia Election Board's Republican majority over recent months. In an 11-page order, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Thomas Cox Jr. declared the rules — passed by the state election board’s Republican majority — are “illegal, unconstitutional and void.” He ordered for the state election board to immediately remove the rules and inform all state and local election officials that those rules are void and not to be followed. The judge wrote in his ruling that the U.S. Constitution prohibits the state election board from enacting election rules regarding the election of federal officers. “The Georgia Constitution provides that only the General Assembly may provide for a law for a procedure whereby returns of all elections by the people are made to the secretary of state,” Cox wrote. “The Election Code accomplishes this and the SEB has no authority to legislate otherwise.” Cox made the decision after a hearing Wednesday in a lawsuit brought by two Republicans, former state Representative Scot Turner and Chatham County election board member James Hall. Turner filed the suit on behalf of his non-profit organization, Eternal Vigilance Action, which says it aims to defend elections from attacks that erode public faith in electoral outcomes based on misinformation and disinformation.
