What's Really In The Georgia Election Law?
The hysteria over calling it Jim Crow 2.0 is a fundraising device for Democrats designed to amplify and enrage.
Governor Kemp has signed legislation in Georgia to reform the state-election process and nationally, Democrats and the media are losing their collective minds. Elizabeth Warren actually tweeted this out.
She literally believes this.
CNN ran the following headline: “Georgia's new law suppressing the vote is a victory for Donald Trump.” One of the key points in this is the restriction of ballot drop boxes. Do you know what happens if the Georgia legislature does not pass a law on ballot drop boxes? They all go away.
In Georgia, ballot drop boxes are not part of the law. They were allowed because the governor of Georgia has an existing state of emergency declaration over COVID-19. As a result, the state authorized, by way of the governor's executive order, ballot drop boxes for people to drop off ballots. When the executive order on the emergency declaration goes away, the authorization for ballet drop boxes goes away. So what did the state legislature do? They legislated into law ballot drop boxes. You can now have ballot drop boxes in the state of Georgia. They can only be in boards of election offices or in places with early voting and they have to be collected by close of business and they have to be monitored. All of this is good.
You do not want people showing up and destroying the ballots by pouring water into the ballet drop boxes overnight when no one's looking. The hysteria over calling it Jim Crow 2.0 is a fundraising device for Democrats designed to amplify and enrage.
There is no difference between the Democrats calling this Jim Crow 2.0 “you got to stand and fight” and President Trump telling a crowd of supporters in Washington that you’ve got to march on the Capitol to defend the integrity of the election. There is no difference at all, except the media thought one was invalid and thought the other was valid, but they are the same damn thing.
State Rep. Park Cannon, a Democrat in the state legislature began to try to interfere with the governor's ability to sign the law last night and people on the left are hailing her as some sort of hero for trying to disrupt the lawful process of government. The same people hailing her as a hero were upset about the people storming the Capitol to try to stop the electoral college votes from being counted. It is the exact same thing. What you are seeing is the hypocrisy of the Democrats and the media who are fine when the left believes crazy conspiracy theories and upset when other people don't.
In Georgia, the law states that if you show up to vote, you must have a photo ID. You must have a driver's license number or the state will give you a free photo ID and you must have that number. What they've done with absentee ballots is instead of examining your signature on an absentee ballot that could change over time, you have to put your driver's license or photo ID number and birthday on the ballot which will be used to verify your identity. There will no longer be signature matches in the state, which is good. My signature on my voter registration card is different from my current signature.
A University of Georgia poll found that a majority of liberals, conservatives, black voters, white voters, men, and women actually supported requiring a photo ID copy be provided to vote absentee. The Republican law does not even go that far — merely requiring a drivers license number or a photo ID number with the photo ID freely provided.
There are a whole lot of people who are already filing lawsuits on this and using it as a fundraising opportunity. But what is in the law? Well, absentee voters will be required to submit their driver's license number or other documentation to verify their identity. There will be as little as one week of early voting before runoffs, down from the current three weeks. Why? Because the runoff will now be four weeks after the general election. That's very relevant here. In Georgia that used to be the law. The runoff happened just a few weeks after the general election. The Obama administration sued and said it wasn't enough time for military ballots. So they stretched it out over a three-month period. It will now be one month from the date of the general election. This is good news because there has been a widespread belief in Georgia among Democrats and Republicans that the runoff window is too long. They also will allow extra weekend voting in special elections.
The state elections board will be able to takeover County election boards when necessary. This is one of those issues where the Democrats are claiming conspiracy, but it's actually good.
For example, the Fulton County Board of Elections in Georgia is a highly incompetent Board of Elections. That County has hired and fired the same person over and over. Fulton never gets its act together and it has nothing to do with partisanship. Every election night, we are always waiting on Fulton to finish reporting. They'll be able to fix this.
The one thing I think is dumb is it outlaws distributing food and drinks to voters waiting in lines. I fail to see the merit in this. I don't have a problem if you want to distribute food and drinks to people standing in long lines waiting to vote as long as there's no political message.
Election workers will be required to count ballots without stopping until they're finished. This was my idea and I’m taking credit for it. Under current Georgia law, you can stop, go home, come back the next day, and pick up the ballots and hope that there's no hanky panky overnight while no one's looking. Under the new law, once you start counting the ballots you cannot stop. To accommodate this, the law allows the processing and counting of absentee ballots before the election. As absentee ballots come in, they will be able to be processed now, which is another good thing. So we're not waiting days and days and days for the absentee balloting process. This is all a really good idea.
The governor signed it last night and they're already filing lawsuits against it. I’m sure a left-wing judge will hear the case and try to obstruct the law by dragging it out. But I got to tell ya, I think this is a really good piece of legislation.
The hysteria from the national media on this is going to be overblown. They've had Stacey Abrams out everywhere making Jim Crow comparisons and it’s only just begun. The reason that national Democrats are screaming so much about Jim Crow and voter suppression is because they are trying to scare their base into continuing to vote for them. But you know what scares people more than requiring their driver's license number on a ballot? The Wokes costing them their job for something that's unacceptable this week but was perfectly acceptable last week.
That is why so many people are leaving the Democratic party and moving to the Republican Party.
Informative post. I could have done without you defending Trump for inciting the Jan 6 insurrection and defending the insurrectionist. Glad to see you speak against the water in line thing. Wasn’t there also some other precisely targeted content toward Sunday morning voting hours?
In Texas the signature on the application to receive a ballot-by-mail must match the signature that is on the envelope containing the ballot that was submitted. Those examining the signatures, a Democrat and a Republican, must agree that the signatures match for the ballot to be counted. If both agree that the signatures do not match or if there is disagreement on whether they match, the signatures are reviewed by the entire ballot committee. The committee can go back as far as six years of signatures on legal documents, etc. to help determine if there was any hanky-panky.
Every step of the process is posted on the voter's information page, including when the application was received, when the ballot was mailed out, when the ballot was returned, and when the signatures were approved. Other security measures are in place concerning ballot-by-mail.
There are laws in place that allow ballots to be returned after election day under certain circumstances for both overseas and domestic voters.
Separate audits are done of the mail-in ballots, election day ballots, and provisional ballots.
The legislature is currently looking at voter integrity issues, so all this could change. I am concerned about knee-jerk reactions to real or imagined issues.