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    Republican voting law poses hurdles in Georgia Senate runoff

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    Republican voting law poses hurdles in Georgia Senate runoffRunoffs lasted nine weeks in previous elections – but under new law, timeline is shortened to 28 days after general election Georgia’s midterm election cycle continues with the state’s highly anticipated US Senate runoff between the incumbent Democrat senator Raphael Warnock and controversial Republican candidate Herschel Walker. However, unlike years past, under the state’s new election integrity law, early voting for the runoff begins just as the general election comes to a close, giving voters a historically small window of time to cast their ballot.Herschel Walker accuser comes forward with fresh relationship claimsRead moreIn previous elections, runoffs lasted nine weeks. Under the new law, SB202, which includes a spate of new voting restrictions, the timeline has been shortened substantially and must occur 28 days after the general election. This timeframe is especially important because voters must now register 30 days before an election, making it impossible for new voters to register between the general election, which took place on 8 November, and the runoff.SB202 is causing confusion among voters and election officials alike – especially as it pertains to Saturday voting. Saturday voting has been made available during early voting in past elections, prompting officials and voters to believe Saturday 26 November would be a day for early voting in the runoffs this year. Yet, under the new law, voting cannot occur close to a holiday, which – because of both Thanksgiving and a state holiday formerly known as Robert E Lee Day – would have pushed the official start of early voting to Monday 28 November instead.Following a lawsuit brought forth by the Democratic party of Georgia, Warnock for Georgia and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, Saturday voting is now permitted on 26 November. It was argued that this specific day of voting was critical for many voters as it would present the only possible Saturday voting under the state’s stricter timeline. (The state unsuccessfully attempted to block the ruling but so far it has been upheld.)Vasu Abhiraman, deputy policy and advocacy director at ACLU of Georgia, also notes the importance of this voting day for college students. “We’ve talked to so many students, who were not able to vote in the [general] election because they either didn’t get their absentee ballot back in time or their ballot wasn’t received in time,” said Abhiraman. “They don’t want to take this chance, and they want to vote when they are home right now for their Thanksgiving break, and that Saturday is the main date that we’re hearing where people will be available and able to vote.”But the issues with early voting in the runoff this year extend past one Saturday. In the state’s last runoff election, there were three weeks of early voting. The state now requires just five days of early voting. Additionally, in the past, these early voting days did not so closely coincide with the certification of the general election. Now, the same time allotted to early voting nearly represents the entire runoff voting period. More than 2.5 million Georgians voted early in the state’s last runoff.During the general election, it was revealed that election officials were working with newly hired staff while trying to accommodate a more rigorous election process, straining the capacity of election administration across the state. Now, they are facing similar challenges as they try to do the same amount of work in an even smaller amount of time yet again.“We’ve seen election officials have to certify their votes, run a risk-limiting audit and have to respond to voter concerns at the same time they are trying to figure out when and where they can possibly hold early voting, who is available to staff it, when they can get their absentee ballots out and how they are going to process it all,” said Abhiraman.Georgia’s Senate runoff election is critical to the landscape of national politics. It will determine the margin of Democrats’ majority in the the US Senate in the new year, a crucial foothold as they just lost control of the House of Representatives. Still, Georgia voters and voting rights advocates are concerned with the state’s ability to ensure access to the vote the second time around.“Counties are trying their best to do what they can to accommodate voters and navigate SB202,” says Abhiraman. “But, in the last Senate runoff, 4.5 million people voted. How can you possibly accommodate 4.5 million voters in less than a month?”TopicsGeorgiaUS midterm elections 2022US politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Herschel Walker, Running in Georgia, Receives Tax Break for Texas Residents

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      Mr. Walker, Georgia’s Republican nominee for Senate, is benefiting from a homestead exemption meant for primary residents of Texas.ATLANTA — Herschel Walker, the Republican candidate for Senate in Georgia, is receiving a tax exemption on his Texas home that is meant for primary residents of the state, despite currently living and running for office in Georgia.Public tax records first reported by CNN show that this year Mr. Walker will receive a homestead tax exemption of roughly $1,500 for his home in the Dallas area, which he listed as his primary residence. He has received the tax relief for his home since 2012, according to an official in the tax appraisal office of Tarrant County, where Mr. Walker’s home is located.Under the Constitution, Senate candidates are required to reside in the state they will represent only once they are elected. In Georgia, candidates must meet a handful of stipulations to establish residency in the state before filing their bids for office. Mr. Walker’s tax exemption in Texas suggests that his primary residence remains outside Georgia.A spokesman for Mr. Walker’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.According to the Texas comptroller, Mr. Walker’s use of the tax exemption while running in Georgia is legal. The comptroller’s website states that you may still receive the tax break after moving away from home temporarily, if “you do not establish a principal residence elsewhere, you intend to return to the home, and you are away less than two years.”Mr. Walker, who grew up in Georgia and was a phenom for the University of Georgia football team, has made his roots a centerpiece of his campaign. His decisive primary victory in May and support from Republican voters were driven in large part by his stardom in the state. He will face Senator Raphael Warnock, a Democrat, in a runoff election on Dec. 6, after neither candidate cleared the 50 percent threshold needed to win in Georgia on Nov. 8.This is not the first time Mr. Walker has faced questions about his residency. Before announcing his Senate campaign in 2021, Mr. Walker lived in Texas for more than two decades. He registered to vote in Georgia in August 2021, days before he declared his candidacy.Andra Gillespie, an associate professor of political science at Emory University, said that Mr. Walker’s tax exemption was unlikely to endanger his qualification for office or turn off the Republicans who supported him in the general election. But she added that in the final weeks of his runoff campaign against Mr. Warnock, the information could add more fodder to Democrats’ argument that Mr. Walker moved back to the state solely for his political career.“Herschel Walker was never making the claim that he was a recent resident of Georgia — he was a native-son candidate,” she said. “If the Democrats can mobilize some additional people based on these allegations, then they will use it that way.”Alyce McFadden More

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      Herschel Walker accuser comes forward with fresh relationship claims

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      Herschel Walker accuser comes forward with fresh relationship claimsWoman who says she was pressured into abortion by Republican Senate hopeful presents unseen letters, audio and diary entries The second woman to allege that she was pressured into having an abortion by Herschel Walker, the Republican nominee in Georgia’s hotly contested US Senate race, on Tuesday presented previously unseen letters, audio recordings and pages of her personal diary that she said were evidence of their relationship, which he has denied.US supreme court allows Congress to view Trump’s tax returnsRead moreAt a press conference in Los Angeles organized by her lawyer, Gloria Allred, the anonymous woman known only as Jane Doe came forward anew with a raft of fresh materials. She said she was doing so because when she first aired her allegations last month “and told the truth, he denied that he knew that I existed”.The alleged new evidence of the relationship between the woman and the former college football star included a voicemail recording in which Walker was purported to say to her: “This is your stud farm calling, you big sex puppy you”.Jane Doe also read out a letter which she said had been written by Walker to her parents. “I do love your daughter and I’m not out to hurt her. She has been a strong backbone for me through all of this,” the letter said.The new allegations surfaced just as early voting is set to begin in the important run-off election for a Georgia seat in the US Senate between Walker, who has publicly called for abortion to be banned, and the Democratic incumbent, Raphael Warnock, following a neck-and-neck result in the midterm elections. Asked whether she was coming forward with a new round of allegations in order to influence the election, Jane Doe said: “Voters can make their own decision. All I can do is tell the truth.”The unnamed woman initially raised her claims on 26 October that she was pressured into an abortion. She alleged that she had an intimate relationship with Walker for six years while he was playing for the Dallas Cowboys and that he paid for her to have an abortion in 1993, driving her to the clinic.Walker rebutted the claims, saying: “I’m done with this foolishness. I’ve already told people this is a lie and I’m not going to entertain it.”At Tuesday’s press conference, Jane Doe read passages of what she said were her personal diaries from 1993 in the days immediately after she learnt she was pregnant. In one extract Walker is alleged to have told her that the pregnancy was “probably his ‘fault’ since he had very high levels of testosterone”.In a second passage, she wrote that Walker “has about gone off the deep end over this whole thing … He thinks that by not having the baby we do have a future chance for happiness that we can ‘grow strong again together’.”Allred read out what she said was a signed declaration from a friend of Jane Doe’s in which she recalled her confiding to her in 1993 that she was pregnant and that Walker had been the partner. Several years later, the friend said in her declaration, “she confessed to me that she had in fact had an abortion in 1993” and that Walker had personally driven her to the clinic.The first woman to make allegations against Walker told the Daily Beast last month that he paid for her to have an abortion in 2009.TopicsUS politicsRepublicansGeorgiaUS midterm elections 2022newsReuse this content More

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      What to Know About the Georgia Runoff

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      Nicole Craine for The New York TimesGeorgia is entering the third week of its runoff election between Senator Raphael Warnock and Herschel Walker, which will be held Dec. 6. Ahead of Thanksgiving, both sides are pouring money into ads and courting national allies for visits.Here’s a look at the race → More

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      Raphael Warnock sues Georgia over early voting restrictions for runoff

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      Raphael Warnock sues Georgia over early voting restrictions for runoffState law limits early voting after state holidays, including Thanksgiving and another formerly honoring Confederate general Raphael Warnock’s campaign sued Georgia on Tuesday after the state said it would not offer Saturday early voting for the closely watched runoff in which Warnock is seeking re-election to the US Senate.The suit challenges the state’s interpretation of a law that would prohibit early voting on the Saturday following Thanksgiving. The day after Thanksgiving is also a state holiday in Georgia, originally to commemorate Robert E Lee, the Confederate civil war general. In 2015, state officials dropped Lee’s name and started recognizing the day simply as a “state holiday”.‘This movement was rejected’: Republican election deniers lose key state racesRead moreLawyers for Warnock’s campaign argued that the voting prohibition only applies to primary and general elections, not runoffs, which have a much shorter voting period. Last year, Georgia Republicans passed a law shortening the runoff period from nine weeks to four. But the shortened runoff period is coming into conflict with the state law that bars early voting around holidays.The state “misreads” and “cherry-picks” provisions of the law that do not apply to runoffs, lawyers for Warnock’s campaign wrote in a complaint, which was joined by the Georgia Democratic party and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. “The secretary’s insistence that counties may not hold advance voting on November 26 therefore has no support in the law and conflicts with [the statute’s] requirement that counties begin advance voting for the December 6 runoff as soon as possible,” it reads.The suit asks a judge to declare that state law does not prohibit counties from offering early voting on the Saturday after Thanksgiving and to order the state not to take any action blocking them from doing so.Georgia law says counties may start early voting “as soon as possible” after the state certifies results from the general election, with a mandatory period from 28 November to 2 December. State law also bars Saturday early voting on the Saturday before a runoff, 3 December.Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, initially said he believed some counties would offer early voting on Saturday, before his office reversed course and said it was prohibited.“It’s not our choice. It’s literally in black-letter law that the Saturday following a state holiday cannot be used for early voting,” Gabriel Sterling, an interim deputy secretary of state, told the Atlanta Journal Constitution. “We all thought there was going to be Saturday voting until we looked at the law really closely.”Gerald Griggs, the president of the Georgia NAACP, said a Confederate holiday should not block voting.A Confederate holiday should not prevent the protection of democracy, which is called voting. That holiday needs to be eliminated. #TakeDownHate #gapol https://t.co/FqxW4zEx7h— Gerald A. Griggs (@AttorneyGriggs) November 13, 2022
      A coalition of civil rights groups separately sent a letter to all of Georgia’s 159 counties on Tuesday urging them to offer at least three additional days of early voting from 7am to 7pm, which is allowed at the counties’ discretion under Georgia law. The coalition urged the counties to offer voting on the Tuesday and Wednesday preceding Thanksgiving as well as the Sunday after the holiday.“If you only offer advance voting on the five days required by statute (which, as noted above, is limited to weekdays), there is a significant risk that many voters will be unable to participate due to obligations during the workday,” lawyers for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the Southern Poverty Law Center and the ACLU of Georgia wrote in the letter. “The lack of weekend or evening voting options is especially concerning for voters of color, who may be less able to take time off from work to vote.”Hillary Holley, the executive director of Care in Action, the political arm of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, tweeted on Tuesday that Fulton county, home to Atlanta and the state’s most populous county, had agreed to start early voting on the Sunday after Thanksgiving. She also said Gwinnett county, one of the largest and most diverse counties in the state, had also agreed to start early voting on Sunday.TopicsUS midterm elections 2022The fight for democracyGeorgiaUS SenateUS politicsnewsReuse this content More