Ahead of Georgia’s 2024 presidential contest in the battleground state, Gov. Brian Kemp signed legislation on Tuesday that amends the state’s election laws further. Among the changes made are definitions of probable causes to remove voters from the rolls when their eligibility is contested.
Motivated by refuted claims of an alleged rigged election, Republican activists have canvassed over 100,000 voters in the state in recent times. According to the activists, they are eliminating voters who have moved out of state and eliminating duplicate records.
The probable cause list for removing voters from the rolls under the bill Kemp signed into law, SB 189, includes nonresidential addresses, evidence of voting or registering in another jurisdiction, and death. The statement that the National Change of Address list can be taken into consideration, but not exclusively, is the most contentious.
Proponents claim that adding a definition for probable cause would complicate the challenge procedure. That claim has been refuted by opponents, who claim that the modifications would allow for more irrational attacks on voters, overwhelming election officials and depriving law-abiding citizens of their right to vote. One instance of a nonresidential address would be a place of business where someone occasionally resides. A voter’s eligibility can be verified using more trustworthy sources of information, like driver’s license information, according to representatives of Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office.
Additionally, the Georgia bill permits challenges to be granted and voters to be removed from the rolls until forty-five days prior to an election. Due in part to federal law prohibiting states and counties from making systematic changes to voting rolls within ninety days of a federal election, liberal groups have threatened to sue over this provision.
The measure also mandates that homeless people register as voters using the county voter registration office’s address rather than their residential address. Some who oppose it claim that homeless people may find it more difficult to cast ballots because their registered polling place may be far away.
The voting rights organization Fair Fight Action, which was established by Stacey Abrams, a former Democratic candidate for governor of Georgia, denounced the enactment of SB 189, branding it a “voter suppression bill that emboldens right-wing activists in their attempts to kick Black and brown voters off the rolls.”
The group released a statement saying, “By allowing SB 189 to become law, Brian Kemp gave a gift to MAGA election deniers.”
The ACLU of Georgia’s executive director, Andrea Young, described the bill as a “step back for voters’ rights and voting access.”
“We will see the governor in court and we are committed to protecting Georgia voters,” the statement reads.
Garrison Douglas, a spokesman for the governor’s office, did not respond to an email sent to him right away.
The bill also allows any political party that has qualified for the presidential election in at least 20 states or territories to participate in Georgia’s election. The move might help independent candidates like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose campaign has Democrats nervous that it might detract from President Joe Biden‘s support.
Raffensperger’s removal from his ex-officio position on the State Election Board is one of the bill’s other modifications. Raffensperger was previously removed from his board voting position by Kemp and Republican lawmakers.
Raffensperger is seen as a special enemy by many Republicans who subscribe to debunked theories that former President Donald Trump was cheated out of Georgia’s 16 electoral votes in 2020, as the Republican secretary of state has vigorously defended the election results that show Biden prevailed.
Raffensperger and a few others had pushed for Kemp to veto the bill—Kemper was a former secretary of state himself.
Furthermore, the bill states that the state will be prohibited from using QR codes, a type of barcode, to count ballots generated by state ballot marking devices as of July 1, 2026. Voters are said to not trust QR codes because they are illegible by those who oppose the current method of counting votes. The bill mandates that ballots be read using either the text or the machine-generated, human-readable markings, such as filled-in bubbles.
Additionally, the bill mandates that counties report the results of every absentee ballot by the end of the business day. In elections where fewer than 5,000 voters are registered, it also permits counties to use paper ballots; however, this change will not be implemented until 2025.
A different election bill that would have prohibited foreign nationals from making political contributions and increased registration requirements for agents of foreign principals was vetoed by Kemp on Tuesday. The governor stated that some of the registration requirements were not intended by the bill’s sponsor and that such donations are already forbidden by federal law.