In April 2023, the Florida legislature passed Senate Bill 7050, a law imposing a slew of new regulations on the activities of third-party voter registration organizations (or “3PVROs” as they are referred to by Florida government officials). Under the law, these groups must re-register with the state before each election cycle in order to collect voter registration forms, and they have a shorter time frame to return voter registration forms to the county supervisor of elections; just 10 days, down from 14, with a $50 penalty per late day, up to $2,500 per application. SB 7050 also requires that applicants are provided with receipts that contain the name of the volunteer or staff member who registered them. 

The law also prohibits individuals previously convicted of felonies from “handling or collecting” voter registration applications, and imposes $50,000 fines for each volunteer violating these standards. This effectively requires 3PVROs to conduct background checks. The ceiling for aggregate fines has also increased: groups can now face up to $250,000 in fines each year, quintupling from the previous figure of $50,000.

The effects of SB 7050 have been felt around the state. In a state that already sees lower voter registration rates across the board, particularly for Black, Latinx, Asian, and other communities of color, outside organizations have long stepped in to fill a void left by state actors. But that work is now stalling. When the law came into effect, Poder Latinx, an organization promoting civic engagement in Latinx communities, paused their programs as there were “no clear guidelines on how to move forward.” Carolina Wassmer, Poder Latinx’s Florida State Director, mentioned that the organization had to work closely with their legal counsel to understand the law’s implications and ways to ensure compliance before resuming voter outreach.

Advocates see SB 7050 as the latest in a wave of voter suppression laws to come out of the state legislature. It was preceded by other laws such as SB 90 and SB 524 which restricted vote-by-mail and increased fines on these groups, respectively. 

“7050 was sort of the deathblow to third-party voter registration,” said Genesis Robinson, interim executive director of Equal Ground Education Fund and Action Fund, a Black-led voter rights organization. “It was really a compounding effect with other voter suppression bills that had passed in previous legislative sessions.”

The requirement of re-registering with the state each election cycle, combined with the possibility of burdensome fines, has “radically changed” how the League of Women Voters of Florida registers voters. “We come prepared with voter registration applications, but we just no longer take them away and turn them in,” Cecile Scoon, co-president of the Florida League, told Bolts. 

Rather than collecting forms and submitting on behalf of voters, League volunteers now provide people with assistance with filling out the form as well as stamps and envelopes that the organization has purchased through fundraising so that applicants can mail the forms on their own. However, this new method only works if individual applicants take the initiative to mail their own form—which is more difficult to guarantee than when 3PVROs collected and submitted on their behalf.

“The whole process of explaining to mail it and everything like that is slower,” Scoon said. Before, volunteers could walk through crowds at Fourth of July parades and community events, handing out and collecting voter registration forms, but now, they are “more stationary at a table.”

D’Bria Bradshaw, Florida state coordinator of the Campus Vote Project, which supports universities in getting students to register, has had to try other novel strategies to avoid any possibility of fines. “The best way to get students registered to vote: direct them to the QR code, direct them to the website, and walk them through registering to vote,” said Bradshaw.

By scanning QR codes, students can access voter registration forms on their electronic devices and fill it out on their own (hopefully right there on the spot) without outside assistance.

Other organizations have also shifted to a digital strategy. Equal Ground has invested in tablets and electronic devices to bring to community events, where organizers walk applicants through the process of registration. “Because of 7050 and the implications with respect to fines and fees and potential jail time, we thought it necessary to mitigate risk as much as possible. And so we have foregone doing paper voter registration applications,” said Robinson. “That has a tremendous impact on the communities that we serve.” Robinson points out that voters of color are five times more likely to be registered to vote by a third-party voter registration organizer.

Recognizing the suppressive nature of SB 7050, several groups challenged the law in federal court shortly after its passage. Abha Khanna of Elias Law Group is the lead attorney on the case Florida NAACP v. Byrd, which challenges three provisions of the law: the personal information retention ban, a previous section that originally prohibited noncitizens from handling voter registration applications as well as people with felony convictions, and the increased fines for late applications or technical errors. The former two provisions are not currently in effect; the first was preliminarily enjoined due to a lack of clarity on what constitutes personal information, while the second was found unconstitutional and permanently enjoined.

The third provision, however, remains in effect and is hampering the functioning of voter organizations. 

“A single late day can really have serious consequences for many of these non-profit organizations on shoestring budgets,” said Khanna. “The result of all of these [provisions] individually and together is to really try to squeeze out and crush third-party voter registration organizations and limit their opportunities and their abilities to register.”

The law has also left voting organizations struggling to find enough willing and able volunteers. When the noncitizen provision was in effect, organizations like Poder Latinx that serve immigrant communities faced shrinking teams as some volunteers were not citizens. Though that provision has been struck down, the provision forbidding volunteers who have previously been convicted of a felony still burdens these groups, as they must conduct background checks to avoid the possibility of facing steep fines, with the maximum penalties of $250,000 per year often exceeding organizations’ annual budgets.

Threats of fines and criminal penalties without clear guidelines on what is required has produced a climate of fear surrounding voter registration work. Robinson of Equal Ground mentioned that many of the organization’s long-time paid canvassers have “walked away from that space voluntarily because their risk is just too great.” And according to Scoon, some League volunteers—particularly older women—are apprehensive about continuing to register voters as they feel that handing out their full names on receipts could endanger their physical safety in a tense political environment.

SB 7050 has also made it more difficult to track how many voters they have registered. Prior to the law, voting organizations had special registration numbers that were added to the forms they collected so that government data would reflect how many voters were registered by each organization. Now that many groups have stopped collecting forms, there is no way to know if voters who received paper forms actually completed and submitted them.

Though procuring an exact number is impossible, Scoon estimated that voter registration numbers have gone down “at least 30 percent” for the League. Wassmer mentioned that Poder Latinx has achieved less than 50 percent of its goal to reach 10,000 voters since the law’s passage. Robinson also described a “deep decline” in the number of voters Equal Ground has been able to reach, as well as an overall decrease in the registration of Black voters across the state.

In 2020, the most recent presidential election year, voting organizations in Florida had registered 458,197 voters. In 2024, they have registered only 13,521 Floridians as of August 31.

This drop is raising alarms about inequalities in voter access. Twenty-four states and the District of Columbia have implemented automatic voter registration in recent years, and some states have explored other innovative ways to reach groups of voters who don’t have contact with typical registration channels such as a DMV. Michigan last year became the first place to automatically register people to vote as they leave prison. And Colorado is working with Native leaders to register voters through tribal enrollment rolls. Several states have tried to enact automatic voter registration through Medicaid, though the reform is being held up at the federal level. 

Where these efforts are still fledgling, outside groups are standing in the gap to reach more voters by promoting voter registration and reducing disparities in civic engagement. “The voters that they tend to reach, that the other services—government services—don’t usually reach, tend to be Black and brown and poor voters,” Khanna said. 

As of November 2022, Florida had the fifth lowest percentage of registered voters as a share of the eligible population. It has no automatic voter registration, nor any state-sponsored mechanisms to promote higher registration numbers, and increasing burdens and punitive measures on outside organizations that threaten to reduce overall voter registration and turnout and widen racial gaps ahead of the 2024 election.

Yet, voting advocates question the need for such extreme restrictions. “It’s not that there’s a rampant issue of these 3PVROs sitting on applications or behaving in a way that was un-diligent when it came to submitting voter registration applications,” Khanna said.

In fact, the opposite seems to be true for many organizations, such as the League of Women Voters of Florida, which had robust training programs requiring volunteers to pass a quiz before registering voters, and pairing newer volunteers with more experienced ones to ensure guidelines were being followed. 

“If they had problems, just deal with the people you have problems with. The League has never had a problem. The League has never been written out, warned, or anything,” Scoon said.

Teresa Cornacchione is the civic engagement coordinator at the University of Florida’s Bob Graham Center for Public Service, an organization that is certified to register students to vote. A major challenge emerged for the Bob Graham Center in 2021, when SB 90 was passed by the Florida legislature, requiring that such groups submit voter registration forms to the supervisor of elections in the county in which the applicant resides. The University of Florida is comprised of students from all across the state, so submitting forms to each of Florida’s 67 counties increased the time and cost associated with voter registration. SB 7050’s narrowing of the time frame to return forms, combined with this 2021 requirement, has made the voter registration process more difficult for staff and volunteers at UF.

Yet, despite these barriers, voting organizations have not given up hope. According to Cornacchione, staff and students at the University of Florida are ready “to work even harder” to register voters. “I don’t think the 3PVRO stuff has really deterred these students from being engaged,” she said. The Bob Graham Center’s Gators Vote initiative visits first-year classes and registers students to vote with the permission of the instructor.

In April, Equal Ground began a statewide tour to educate voters on new registration requirements, the implications of voter suppression laws, and issues that will be on the ballot. Similarly, the League is hosting forums, litigating, participating in bus tours, preparing voter guides, and tabling at colleges, churches, and community events. The organization is also mobilizing voters around abortion rights, which is on the 2024 ballot as Amendment 4.

“There’s a lot of mobilization that you can do that is not directly attached to voter registration,” Scoon said. 

The post Florida Law Strikes “Deathblow” to Outside Groups Trying to Register New Voters  appeared first on Bolts.

The new measure passed by Republicans and signed into law by Alabama Republican Governor Kay Ivey last week makes it illegal for paid organizers to help others vote by mail, threatening the work of grassroots and national organizations who help voters register and cast their ballots. It includes a bevy of draconian punishments including lengthy jail sentences if paid organizers help others fill out or return their absentee ballots.

A lawsuit to block the bill is likely in the coming weeks.

“There’s definitely gonna be legal action,” Anneshia Hardy, the executive director of Alabama Values, a progressive advocacy organization, told Bolts. “That was already in discussion.”

A number of other leading civil rights groups who work in the state were tight-lipped about what their legal plans are, but they have been gearing up for this specific fight for some time. Last year, a nearly identical bill passed the Alabama House, but died in the senate. Kathy Jones, the head of Alabama League of Women Voters, told Bolts at the time that if the bill had passed then, “we would have sued.”

The law makes it even harder to vote by mail in one of the states with the most restrictive voting laws in the country, and threatens paid organizers with jail time if they violate its somewhat-vague provisions. Civil rights groups believe the new law is unconstitutional, but they’re even more worried about the fear the law will create for grassroots organizations’ efforts than the enforcement itself.

Hardy said she’d been talking to multiple groups who do voter education and outreach in the state who were alarmed that their normal work helping Black voters vote could now be illegal under the new law. And she said she’d been in touch with allied groups in Florida, which passed a similar law two years ago, about how they navigated that situation. 

“Some of the organizations stop the effort [to help people vote], because of the ambiguity and also, quite frankly, not wanting to take that risk. It makes a hostile climate for groups who are just trying to ensure that people have access to voting,” she said.

The new law bans anyone besides immediate family members and cohabitants from turning in anyone else’s completed absentee ballot applications, with the exception for people with disabilities or who can’t read or write, in an attempt to root out voter fraud by targeting what Republicans derisively call “ballot harvesting.”

Anyone who knowingly pays someone else to request, collect, or deliver absentee ballots could face a Class B felony charge—the same felony class as first-degree manslaughter in Alabama—which carries a prison sentence of up to 20 years. Anyone who is paid to request, collect, complete, prefill, obtain or deliver a voter’s absentee ballot faces a class C felony—the same felony class as looting, third-degree robbery and stalking—punishable by up to ten years in prison.

This new law comes amidst a renewed war from Alabama Republicans to restrict voting access in the state and strengthen their vice-like grip on political power at the expense of the state’s sizeable African American population. 

Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the state’s Republican legislators had violated the Voting Rights Act with an illegal gerrymander of Alabama’s congressional district lines, and ordered them to draw a second district where Black voters would have a say in who represents them. Even that didn’t stop those lawmakers, who proceeded to try to ignore the Supreme Court’s ruling until another court ordered them to reverse course.

Even before this new law passed, Alabama had some of the most onerous voting systems in the country. It’s one of only four states that allows no opportunities for people to vote early in-person, along with Delaware, Mississippi and New Hampshire. It also is one of just 20 states still requiring people to have a specific reason for voting absentee by mail.

And there have been very few proven cases of voter fraud in Alabama. Even the conservative Heritage Foundation, a major proponent of anti-voting fraud legislation, has identified just 20 cases of voting fraud in Alabama since 2000. The only person charged with voting fraud in the last five years is former Republican state Representative David Cole.

“This is a bill that is proposing incarceration and criminal penalties for a problem that doesn’t exist,” ACLU Alabama staff attorney Laurel Hattix said during testimony against the bill last month.

But that hasn’t stopped Alabama Republicans from crying fraud.

When Ivey signed the bill into law last Wednesday, she declared “Under my watch, there will be no funny business in Alabama elections.”

The recently passed law was long a passion project for Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen, who introduced a similar bill in 2022, when he was still in the state legislature. 

Allen, also a Republican, said in a statement after Ivey signed the bill into law that its passage “signals to ballot harvesters that Alabama votes are not for sale.”

But during his tenure as secretary of state, Allen has actually eroded safeguards against voter fraud. His first official act in office was to pull Alabama out of the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), a bipartisan, multi-state information-sharing effort that helps states identify voters who are also registered in other states in order to help prevent voting fraud. 

Allen was one of a number of Republican secretaries of state to attack, then quit, the organization after it became a target of false right-wing conspiracy theories. Allen has now attempted to set up a parallel version of ERIC, partnering with a handful of other red states in an effort that experts say lacks the basic information necessary to be accurate and effective.

Ronald James, an Alabama political consultant who until recently was the state organizer for Black Voters Matter, said that the new law will “scare a lot of people” and be “devastating” to grassroots groups like his former organization that work to help Black voters cast absentee ballots—especially rural elderly voters and those with limited literacy.

James said he’d worked with grassroots organizations in recent years whose normal activities are now considered felonies, like giving gas money to volunteers to drive others to vote, “or paying volunteers who are dedicated to making sure that people in senior citizen homes and elderly in their churches and in the neighborhood and community have a chance to cast their ballot.”

Now, if those volunteers violate the new law, they and the organization’s leaders alike could be facing jail time.

“There’s going to be a lot of people—a lot of people who just are not able to vote,” he said. “It’s catastrophic to the political scope of how we are active in communities, particularly in Black communities.”

The post Alabama Civil Rights Groups Scramble to Fight Back Against New Voting Law appeared first on Bolts.

But even with all these hurdles, a cadre of advocates, nonprofits, churches, and community-minded elected officials have shown up year after year for decades, working hard to protect the right to participate in democracy—especially for Black and other minority voters, who are often the most affected by voting restrictions. 

“We have organizations across the state that are part of the Civic Engagement Roundtable that’s organized by One Voice,” said Representative Zakiya Summers, a Democrat in the state house, referencing a Jackson nonprofit focused on policy advocacy. “These organizations are on conference calls every month. They have created voting rights guides and information that partner organizations can distribute in their community to get people educated and engaged.”

In the lead-up to this year’s primary elections in August, these advocates were gearing up to contend with the latest obstacle that Mississippi’s Republican-controlled legislature had thrown their way: Senate Bill 2358. The bill, which passed in the spring and went into effect on July 1, prohibits anyone from assisting another voter in handling and returning a mail-in ballot unless they are an immediate family or household member, a caregiver, or authorized election worker or mail carrier. Anyone caught violating the law could face up to a year in county jail and a fine of up to $3000.

Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves praised the bill when he signed it into law, saying that it would protect against “ballot harvesting,” or the practice of collecting ballots en masse, a fear that is central to the unfounded conspiracies about voter fraud that conservatives around the country latched onto since the 2020 election.

Despite a lack of evidence of widespread ballot harvesting or other fraud in Mississippi elections, the bill has threatened to limit the number of volunteers and advocates involved in get-out-the-vote efforts from sending or retrieving ballots on behalf of voters they don’t live with. More importantly, it could impede ballot access for people who count on this kind of assistance. 

“It just seemed like another barrier that would prevent people with disabilities from being able to vote autonomously,” says Jane Walton, the communications officer for Disability Rights Mississippi, which includes voting access among their advocacy work. “The bill in question dealt with whether or not someone can have a person assist them. Really, it’s an issue of whether a person with a disability has the autonomy to choose to vote in a way that is most accessible to them.”

Soon after it was passed, groups including Disability Rights Mississippi and Mississippi’s League of Women Voters sued the state in federal court to block the law, stating it “impermissibly restricts voters with disabilities from having a person of their choice assist them in submitting their completed mail-in absentee ballots.” On July 26, a federal judge sided with them and temporarily blocked the law, saying it disenfranchised voters with disabilities and violated the Voting Rights Act.

The decision blocked enactment of SB 2358 just in time for the Aug. 8 primary, and will also prevent it from taking effect ahead of the general election in November, when Mississippians will vote on nearly every major office, including governor and lieutenant governor, secretary of state, and representatives in both legislative chambers. Polling indicates that Republican incumbents who supported the bill—including the embattled Reeves, and Attorney General Lynn Fitch—are favored to win in this deep red state.

But no matter who people cast their vote for, advocates are more concerned about some residents being able to cast a vote at all. The suspension of SB 2358 offers some temporary relief, but these advocates fear that the threat of similar legislation still looms.

“For the past two years, we’ve been monitoring legislation that [has]pretty much been pushed by the Secretary of State every year to deal with ballot harvesting, Jarvis Dortch, Executive Director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in Mississippi, told Bolts. ”That makes it harder to return a ballot by absentee, especially individuals with disabilities.”

Before the passage of this bill, advocates already had their hands full navigating existing restrictions that make it harder for citizens to vote, and for Black candidates to win. 

The state requires eligible voters to register 30 days before elections, one of the earliest deadlines in the country. This means that often, advocates must find eligible voters early, and educate them on the importance of registering long before there’s any major discussion of elections in the media, because there’s no early voting or same-day registration options as a backup. And advocates must repeat this process every year thanks to Mississippi’s odd-year elections. 

But in order to even register, eligible voters must comply with a stringent voter ID law, passed in 2011 by way of a ballot initiative that established a strict list of acceptable forms of ID, including a birth certificate, firearms permit, driver’s license, college ID card, US passport, tribal ID, or Voter ID card. 

“Voter ID targeted vulnerable populations who may not have access to ID or may not have access to a birth certificate so they can get an ID. The law was written so strongly that the state was willing to provide a free Voter ID,” says Summers.

Voting absentee by mail is also an involved process in Mississippi. As opposed to the majority of states, which offer no-excuse absentee voting, mail ballots are only available to populations with qualifying characteristics, including those living out-of-state, students, people with disabilities, people over 65, and certain others. Absentee ballots must be postmarked by election day to be counted. 

“We make it harder than anyone else to get folks registered and make it hard for people to vote absentee,” said Dortch. We don’t provide early voting. Now, instead of making it easier for folks to vote, we’re trying to get people off the voting rolls… and make it harder for people to actually vote absentee. When we have one of the hardest processes to vote absentee in the country. It doesn’t make sense.” 

Mississippi has also had a longtime a lifelong ban on voting for people convicted of certain types of felonies, a policy which has disenfranchised nearly 130,000 Black voters, or 16 percent of the state’s adult Black population. It’s one of only three states, alongside Tennessee and Virginia, where anyone stripped of voting rights loses it for their whole life. They can only regain it if they receive an exceedingly rare pardon from the legislature or the governor.

A federal appeals court this summer struck down that system as unconstitutional, calling it a “cruel and unusual punishment,” and denouncing Mississippi as “an outlier among its sister states, bucking a clear and consistent trend in our Nation against permanent disenfranchisement.” The state appealed the decision in late August, and the rights of hundreds of thousands of Mississippians are still hanging in the balance.

Perhaps unsurprisingly given all these restrictions, Mississippi has one of the lowest voter turnout rates in the country. In the 2022 midterms, Mississippi ranked eighth from last, with roughly 46 percent of voters showing up. And turnout for non-white voters was even lower.

Democrats and progressives have historically championed an increase in access to voting options in the state, and have in turn looked to Black and other disenfranchised voters for support in elections. This upcoming race is no exception. Democrat gubernatorial candidate Brandon Presley, for example, is betting on bases of support in majority-Black enclaves around the capital city of Jackson, as well as pockets of white and immigrant progressive and moderate voters scattered around the Mississippi Delta in his long-shot bid to oust Tate Reeves.

Ty Pinkins, the Democratic candidate for secretary of state, is a recent addition after previous candidate Shuwaski Young dropped out of the race for health reasons. While Pinkins has limited time to build name recognition before the contest, he’s hoping that a campaign message of easing the state’s restrictive voting laws will connect with voters.

“Making sure people can register to vote online makes sense, making sure that we have a way for people to do early voting—that makes sense, and not restricting access to the ballot for people with disabilities,” Pinkins told Mississippi Today. 

SB 2358 remains on hold until further hearings are held and a final decision is handed down. And while advocates, voters, and progressive candidates can continue to move as if the law had never been signed, the landscape for voting rights remains difficult in Mississippi. But advocates are quick to mention that they will continue to work to make progress. 

“We along with our partners and our co-counsel are absolutely prepared to do everything that we can to protect the rights of citizens with disabilities,” said Walton. “Whatever that road looks like going forward, we’re prepared to fight for accessibility in Mississippi’s voting system.”

Correction (Sept. 14): An earlier version of this post misspelled the name of the communications officer from Disability Rights Mississippi.

This article is part of U.S. Democracy Day, a nationwide collaborative on Sept. 15, the International Day of Democracy, in which news organizations cover how democracy works and the threats it faces. To learn more, visit usdemocracyday.org.

The post Mississippi Organizers Navigate Difficult Voting Rights Terrain in Run Up to November appeared first on Bolts.

From the very first days of early voting, voters queued in long lines all around the state waiting to cast their ballots in person. Some polling sites in the Atlanta metro area had estimated wait times of two to three hours.

A handful of counties offered Saturday voting on Nov. 26 after Thanksgiving, despite objections from the state’s Republican leadership, such as Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. The majority of the state opened the polls on Monday Nov. 28, which saw a record 300,000 people turn out. According to the secretary of state’s website, more than 1.7 million votes have been cast in early voting so far.

Speaking with Bolts, Crystal Greer from Protect the Vote GA, a grassroots group formed to combat voter suppression, said the current scramble to turn out voters was exactly what voting advocates worried about after the passage of Senate Bill 202 shortly after the 2020 election and Senate runoff. 

“We knew that what we’re seeing right now is what that bill was pretty much created to do,” Greer said. “The lines you’re seeing right now are not a good sign. A form of voter suppression.”

Just as they did two years before, Georgians are turning out to decide an open Senate seat in a runoff election after no clear winner emerged in the contest between Republican Herschel Walker and Democrat Raphael Warnock, the incumbent Senator. Control of the Senate is not at stake this time, but Democrats are looking to expand their majority.

But unlike the 2020 election, where the runoff period lasted nearly two months, this cycle there’s approximately four weeks with only five days of mandated early voting. Republicans tightened the runoff election period with a provision in SB 202 last year, a move that advocates at the time worried would make voter turnout more difficult.

The bill, signed into law by Governor Brian Kemp in 2021 with support from Raffensperger and other Georgia Republicans, created myriad new obstacles for people who want to take part in the runoff. It has meant, for one, that people could not register to vote after Nov. 8 because there isn’t enough time for them to get on the voter rolls, unlike in the run-up to the 2021 runoffs. 

It also shortens the window to vote by mail, a procedure that Democrats have rushed toward since the pandemic; voters had less time to request a mail-in ballot (that deadline was Nov. 25) and must mail it back by the deadline of runoff Election Day. It also limited the use of secure absentee ballot drop boxes to only during the early voting period. Ballot drop-off was further restricted to the times early voting polling stations are open, versus 24-hour availability in 2020. 

That change has added pressure on the state’s in-person voting facilities, as already short-staffed polling places have had to simultaneously certify the results of the general election and prepare for the runoff election. Capacity has been a factor in the serpentine lines voters have had to contend with. 

Most contentiously, the shorter window threatened the viability of weekend voting. Raffensperger’s office originally interpreted the law to prohibit early voting on Saturday, Nov. 26, due to an existing law saying that voting cannot be held immediately following a state holiday. A lawsuit filed before Thanksgiving challenged Raffensperger’s determination, leading upwards of 22 out of 159 counties to open locations for Saturday voting. 

All of these restrictions have impacted students home for the holidays and full-time workers unable to wait in line during the week, for whom the importance of weekend voting—along with these other alternative methods of voting—cannot be stressed nearly enough. 

During a press briefing, Vasu Abhiraman, senior policy counsel at the ACLU of Georgia, spoke about the challenges the tight timeline and confusion around Saturday voting caused for many voters, including students. 

“We had short lines on Election Day two years ago, for both the general election and the runoff, because there were robust early voting opportunities and opportunities to vote by mail,” Abhiraman said. “What do we see here for the runoff? Well, we see absentee by mail, nearly an impossible proposition. We have been contacted by so many out-of-state students who are worried about voting absentee by mail.” 

Abhiraman said he waited an hour and 45 minutes to vote at a library in DeKalb County in metro Atlanta. 

Besides the confluence of issues during this runoff that stems from SB 202, Raffensperger’s actions as secretary of state have fueled challenges. Raffensperger gained national attention for opposing then-President Donald Trump’s subversion effort in 2020, but he then channeled that reputation to defend the GOP’s changes to voting laws. 

“The cries of ‘voter suppression’ from those on the left ring as hollow as the continuously debunked claims of ‘mass voter fraud’ in Georgia’s 2020 election,” he said in 2021.

But Raffensperger has a history of fanning the flames of suspicions about election integrity; in the 2020 primary he created a criminal task force to investigate alleged absentee ballot fraud after mailing all eligible Georgia voters an absentee ballot application. (Nearly two years later, the group’s investigation found virtually no fraud.) After the general election, Raffensperger created a process with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation to conduct a signature audit of absentee ballots in Cobb County, something he previously had indicated was not possible. 

In the run-up to the runoff, he issued guidance claiming the provision of Saturday voting after a holiday ahead of the Dec. 6 runoff was prohibited by a state statute, even though he had not challenged Saturday voting after a holiday ahead of the Jan. 5, 2021, runoff. Even after Saturday voting was allowed to proceed, Raffensperger’s office signaled to the state legislature it should address “the confusion.” That could result in an outright ban on Saturday voting in future runoffs. Georgia Republicans retained control of the state government on Nov. 8, so they have the ability to further restrict voting laws in their next legislative session. 

Meanwhile, students like Madeline Berns are already experiencing challenges trying to vote. Berns told Bolts that she lives an hour south of where she currently attends school. Planning to vote in the 2022 general election, Berns said she applied for an absentee ballot on Sept. 23. She said the ballot was issued on Oct. 11 but never received it. 

“On Election Day, I had to skip school and leave a medical appointment early to vote at my assigned polling place,” Berns said. “It took about three hours out of my day and 80 miles worth of gas. The poll workers hadn’t filed a provisional ballot before, so they were confused. We got it worked out, though.”

​​Reflecting on the 2020 election, Berns said she voted absentee without issue. With the tight turnaround for the runoff election, she planned to drive home on Election Day.  

“I don’t want to risk that again, so I didn’t apply for another absentee ballot,” she said. “My county didn’t have early voting when I was home for Thanksgiving. It’s unfortunate because I’ll be in the middle of finals season, but I think it’s important.”

Voting rights advocates and engagement organizers say the secretary of state should have done more to ensure voters had the best information available about polling locations and voting options. County election boards, which in the 2020 election took advantage of donations from voting-focused non-profit organizations such as the Center for Tech and Civic Life to fund election administration, were banned from directly receiving such funding under SB 202. The secretary of state’s office has the power to step up its assistance, but so far has not, leaving non-profit organizations to stand in the gap.

During a press briefing at the start of early voting, Stephanie Ali, policy director at the New Georgia Project, said the coalition reached out to officials in each of the state’s 159 counties to get the correct information out to voters. According to Ali, the secretary of state’s site had little to no information going into the weekend early voting. 

“We did the legwork,” said Ali. “This is work that shouldn’t have to be done by nonprofit organizations. It shouldn’t have to be done by political entities. It should be done by our counties, especially our Secretary of State.”

Greer said that some polling locations around the state needed more workers on site, resulting in long lines during early voting. She attributed the poll worker shortage partly to the increased attacks on poll workers in the aftermath of the 2020 election. 

“You have this bottleneck happening in these lines because there’s only two people working or something like that,” she said. “There’s no incentive to hire new poll workers. And also make them feel safe.”

The various accounts of workers being doxxed, harassed and threatened created a chilling effect for some who might otherwise sign up. Greer also said proper training was an issue. 

“We’re still evolving with these voting machines, and so if something goes down, there’s just not enough adequate training for that person to reboot it,” she said. “The line literally stops. Nothing’s happening until that gets fixed.”

Greer said the voter protection coalition would continue fighting for improvements in election administration and expanding ballot access. Georgia voters have remained resilient and continued to vote regardless of wait times and tight deadlines, right up through the final hours of early voting.

Berns believes schools could do more to help students engage in the electoral process, like having Election Day as a school holiday.

“I don’t even think it’s an excused absence here,” she said. “It would be better, though, to just make sure absentee ballots are approved, sent, and received in a timely fashion.”

Joanna Louis-Ugbo, a student at Emory University and organizer with the Georgia Youth Justice Coalition, echoed the importance of making voting accessible for students. 

“We had to fight to keep our precinct on campus because a lot of these students do not have cars or transportation to go to a precinct that will be a little bit further out,” Louis-Ugbo said. “It’s very important to have precincts on these campuses.”

The post Long Lines, Short Windows: How Georgia’s New Restrictive Voting Law Complicates the Senate Runoff appeared first on Bolts.