Republican lawmakers in Georgia recently passed a bill critics say will unfairly impact Democratic voters in the upcoming presidential election.
The bill, which was passed by lawmakers last week, would allow individuals to be removed from voter rolls as a result of voter challenges. Under Georgia law, individuals and groups are allowed to challenge voter eligibility in mass.
The new law would expand probable cause for these challenges, allowing those concerned with election security to use the controversial National Change of Address list maintained by the U.S. Postal Service. Critics of the bill say that this list is inaccurate, and that the bill would disproportionately target Democratic-leaning voters.
Rocky Raffle is the Athens-Clarke County Board of Elections and Voter Registration Chairperson. He is concerned about how unhoused individuals would be impacted by the bill.
“What it would do is require those folks to use the county registrar’s office and then the bill does not go on to specify how they would be assigned to a precinct or a district, it just creates a lot of confusion,” he says.
He also says that the bill would put undue burdens on elections workers by requiring absentee ballots to be tabulated an hour after the polls close.
“For large counties that utilise absentee ballot voting, that’s nearly impossible,” he says.
Raffle estimates that it took election workers two days to count absentee ballots during the last presidential election in 2020.
