Jay Bookman: Early Voter Turnout in Georgia: How Did the Democrats During the 2008 Elections Campaign Suppress Voter Fraud?
The editor has a note. Jay Bookman is an author and national award-winning political columnist from Georgia who has written for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and other newspapers. He’s writing for the Georgia Recorder regularly. Follow him on Twitter at @jaysbookman. The views expressed here are his own. Read more opinion at CNN.
Early voting totals in Georgia are approaching those of a presidential election year, with voters coming out in record numbers. It is obvious that in a fiercely fought campaign season such as this one, the question is natural: What does it mean?
It’s hard to say if the outcome will be predicted. While high turnout is important for Democrats in the Trump era, it may not be as important as they used to think.We don’t know if the early-voter surge is good or bad for Democrats, and we may have to use other means to get people to vote. With so many wild card factors playing this year, it is hard to know what will drive voters to the polls.
That uncertainty is a nightmare for pollsters. Predicting how people will vote is pretty easy. Predicting whether they’ll vote is a hard thing to do. It is a caution for the rest of us to be careful with how much credence we place in pollsters work.
Gov. Brian Kemp, who signed the bill into law, and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who advocated for it, had already conceded that voter fraud played no role in recent election outcomes. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation, along with federal officials from the Department of Justice and state and federal judges, came to the conclusion that we had safe, secure, honest elections. And if fraud wasn’t the real reason for those changes, what was?
That’s what happens when you sell people on a false narrative, then rewrite state law to encourage taking action on that false narrative. If voting isn’t being suppressed so far, confidence in voting surely has been.
The Democrats built a well funded voter-protection apparatus to help people overcome bureaucratic hurdles and cast their ballot.
That last point is very important. The changes implemented in Senate Bill 202 made it more difficult to vote, and were used by the Republicans to fight voter fraud. But logically, that motive makes no sense.
In suburban Gwinnett County, for example, “voting integrity” activists have challenged the eligibility of more than 40,000 registered voters in the increasingly diverse, increasingly Democratic county, putting an incredible burden on the county’s small elections staff. The challenges that have been acted upon so far have been rejected in a 3-2, party-line vote, with two Democrats and an independent outvoting Republicans.
And it’s the consequences of that bad-faith narrative that ought to worry us. As we witnessed in 2020, Trump took the suspicion and distrust of the electoral system that the GOP had nurtured over decades and he repurposed it to an even more nefarious goal, transforming it from an excuse to suppress voting into an excuse to treat election outcomes as illegitimate altogether.
Trump is telling people at rallies that he does not believe we will have a fair election again. I don’t think it’s true.
In SB 202, for example, Georgia Republicans added a clarifying sentence to a section of state law regarding how a voter, or elector, can legally challenge the eligibility of other voters to cast ballots. There is no limit to the number of people who may challenge the qualifications of the elector. The new law also requires local election boards to hold a hearing on such challenges within 10 business days.
Conservatives are frustrated that the challenges they have been attempting to make of the eligibility of tens of thousands of legally registered voters have failed.
At the October 19 meeting of the elections board, an activist was frustrated and told the board that they were doing their job. “Get your county in order or get your things in order.”
“With this new appeal … voters’ right to the ballot box is in jeopardy again,” Stephanie Ali, policy director of the New Georgia Project, said of the GOP’s emergency petition.
Earlier Tuesday, voting rights advocates praised the lower court rulings that allowed Saturday balloting and publicly implored all 159 counties in the state to offer voting that day and to extend their hours on every early voting day. They said restricting advance voting could hurt working class Georgians.
Tuesday’s filing of the High-profile, December 6 runoff election between Sen. Raphael Warnock and Democratic challenger Herschel Walker
Tuesday’s filing is the latest legal twist in the high-profile, December 6 runoff election between Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock and Republican challenger Herschel Walker.
In their Tuesday petition to the state’s high court, the Republican committees said two counties are having trouble staffing polling locations on Saturday, and many others are occupied with other tasks, such as testing and setting up machines for use in the runoff.
The time-crunch election workers now face can be traced back to the controversial 2021 election law passed by the Republican-controlled Georgia legislature, which cut the time allowed for a runoff from nine weeks to four.
In order for early voting to be allowed on this Saturday, there must be at least one state holiday on Thursday or Friday.
The suit that had pushed for Saturday voting had been brought by the Georgia Democratic Party and the Senate campaign arm. They argued that the state law did not apply.
Ms. Cannon said, “Runoffs are not to the benefit of working families.” It is hard to vote again within four weeks of taking time off.
“People showed up in record numbers within the narrow confines of time given to them by a state legislature that saw our electoral strength the last time and went after it with surgical precision,” Mr. Warnock said in his victory speech. “The fact that voters worked so hard to overcome the hardship put in front of them does not eliminate the fact that hardship was put there in the first place.”