After the contentious 2020 election, legislators in Georgia proposed a bevy of new laws that they say will help make elections there more secure and restore public confidence. Critics say the new laws amount to the worst example of voter suppression since the Jim Crow era. To help separate fact from fiction, Newell invited Politico reporter Zach Montellaro onto the show Tuesday morning.
“Zach, this change in the law seems to have taken on a whole new life,” Newell began. “I look at our own election laws here in Louisiana, and what they've done in Georgia, we've already had on our books for 20 years. It just doesn't seem to be earth shattering to us... your thoughts?”
“I will not profess to be an expert on Louisiana election law, but what actually passed in Georgia is going to result in making it harder for certain people to vote, certainly, but it was less restrictive than the initial proposals,” Montellaro explained. “The initial proposals in Georgia would have rolled back no-excuse absentee voting, meaning not everyone is mailed a ballot, but you could request one, which I believe is not the case in Louisiana. It also would have ended weekend Sunday voting, which is very popular in Georgia.”
“But there's something interesting about that - I didn't realize it until I started looking at the Georgia election law, but not every county in Georgia allowed voting on Sunday. So there's not a consistent application throughout the state,” Newell said.”
“There're 159 counties in Georgia, ranging from some with a couple of thousand people, very small, to some that are massive, that make up metro Atlanta,” Montellaro said. “What the bill ended up doing is actually the reverse. It didn't cut Sunday voting, and now mandates Saturday voting, which wasn't always the case, especially in those really tiny counties. In one county I talked to earlier this year, they had 2,000 registered voters. So they wouldn't typically have a weekend voting, and now they are mandated to have Saturday voting and says Sunday voting is optional. Tthe proposal was to outlaw Sunday voting initially, which again, did not pass. Sunday voting is very, very popular especially among Black voters in Metro Atlanta. That was one of the initial proposals that didn't ultimately make it into law.”
“In Louisiana, we've never allowed Sunday voting,” Newell pointed out. “It's kind of strange as to what folks’ expectations are. So what is it about this bill that the Democrats keep saying is voter suppression, and is racist?”
“For Democrats, it is what ultimately did end up getting passed in Georgia,” Montellaro said. “You need an ID to vote in person on election day, but to vote via the mail, when the system was initially set up by Republicans, it was set up with a signature system, because it's onerous for some people to send a photocopy of their ID. Now, Georgia mail ballots will require either an ID number off your driver's license, or a copy of particular sets of IDs. Voter ID is something that polling shows that is very popular, but there's certain subsets of the population that just don't have easy access to that ID. Particularly, poor Americans don't. So that’s one of the main provisions of it. One of the other provisions is that it's removing the Secretary of State's office from power from the state board of elections, and kind of turning the state board of elections over to the state legislature. That's another major concern among Democrats, that the state board of elections is functionally controlled by the legislature now, because three of the five seats will be appointed by the legislature.”
“Why does that happen to be a problem?” Newell asked. “Wasn't part of the issue that we had in the last elections, is that the local elections officials in many counties just ignored what the state law was?”
“There's nobody more invested in elections than state legislatures, right?” Montellaro said. “State legislatures are elected quite regularly, and giving them control of the state board would allow them to wade into the board's decisions. Certainly the board will be operating with the best interests, not of the voters in mind, but of the state legislature, which aren't always one and the same. And the state board also now has the ability to replace local election officials, your county election officials, your county election superintendents. The state board, which again will be functionally controlled by the state legislature, could now replace them. And in Georgia, the larger counties, sometimes do not trust the state board, frankly And they don't trust the state legislature, those large democratic counties. They feel uneasy that the state legislature, which is right now controlled by Republicans, could theoretically come in and replace their election officials.”
Hear the entire interview in the audio player below.
