Stacy Abrams and others claim that Georgia’s new voting integrity law, S.B. 202, promotes minority voter suppression, for example due to the requirement to provide photo identification to apply for an absentee ballot. However, compared to the small number of eligible voters who lack a photo ID, there is a much larger group of voters, which includes minorities, whose votes could be suppressed by the strange events that occurred during the 2020 presidential election in Georgia and other states.
When absentee ballots are indiscriminately sent out everywhere and are accepted with a much lower rejection rate than previously recorded, it seems likely that some of those ballots could have been filled out by someone other than the person whose name is on the ballot, and it also seems that the safeguards against fraudulent absentee ballots may have been set aside. When many new and unusual things happen during an election, some voters will think there is no good reason for them to ever bother voting again, if their votes will not count.
Voter suppression of conservatives who have lost their belief in election integrity is a real concern, because elections can’t be won without the votes. The Atlanta Journal Constitution reported that 752,00 people who voted in the presidential election did not vote in the senate runoff two months later. 51% of 1,000 U.S. likely voters in an April 2021 Rasmussen survey said that cheating affected the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. How many Republicans are now less likely to vote, thinking there is no point in voting because of election fraud?
It is very important that voters be aware of the provisions in the new law to strengthen election integrity, so that they turn out and cast their votes in 2022! A requirement that a voter must apply for an absentee ballot reduces the ease of another person accessing unrequested ballots that travel through the mail. Requiring identification to apply for an absentee ballot helps ensure that these ballots are only used by eligible voters. Those are two of the changes made to Georgia’s election code, and future posts will identify some of the other provisions of the new law meant to address issues that occurred in the 2020 election.