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      Trump and his allies push new Republican effort to restrict voting laws

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      A Republican lawyer who advised Donald Trump on his campaign to overturn the 2020 election results is now playing a central role coordinating the Republican effort to tighten voting laws around the country.
      The moves comes as Trump himself signaled his support for new Republican-pushed legislation in Georgia which critics have slammed as being a major blow to voting rights for communities of color, especially Black voters. Joe Biden called the Georgia laws “Jim Crow in the 21st Century” and “an atrocity”.

      But Trump, whose grip on the Republican party remains strong, welcomed the Georgia developments. “Congratulations to Georgia and the Georgia state legislature on changing their voter rules and regulations,” Trump said in a statement through his Pac, Save America, which repeated his baseless allegation that fraud was a factor in his election loss to Biden. “They learned from the travesty of the 2020 presidential election, which can never be allowed to happen again. Too bad these changes could not have been done sooner!”
      Trump is still a dominant force among the party’s Republican base and his backing for clamping down on voting rights – and the involvement of people close to him – reveal the likely future direction of the party as it faces up to diversifying demographic trends in America at odds with its mostly white support.
      Cleta Mitchell, a longtime Republican lawyer and advocate for conservative causes, was among the Trump advisers on a January phone call in which Trump asked Georgia election officials to “find” enough votes to declare him, and not Biden, the winner of the battleground state.
      Now Mitchell has taken the helm of two separate efforts to push for tighter state voting laws and to fight Democratic efforts to expand access to the ballot at the federal level. She is also advising state lawmakers crafting the voting restriction proposals. And she is in regular contact with Trump.
      “People are actually interested in getting involved and we have to harness all this energy,” Mitchell said in an interview with the Associated Press. “There are a lot of groups that have projects on election integrity that never did before.”
      Trump’s false claims of fraud during and after the 2020 election have fueled a wave of new voting restrictions.
      More than 250 proposed voting restrictions have been proposed this year by mostly Republican lawmakers, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.
      On Thursday, Georgia’s GOP governor signed into law a measure requiring voters to present ID to vote by mail, gives the GOP-controlled state legislature new powers over local elections boards and outlaws providing food or water to people waiting in line to vote.
      In response, Democrats have stepped up the push for a massive federal election overhaul bill. That proposal, known as HR1, would effectively neuter state-level voter ID laws, allow anyone to vote by mail if they wanted to and automatically register citizens to vote. Republicans view that as an encroachment on state control over elections and say it is designed to give Democrats an advantage.
      “The left is trying to dismantle 100 years of advancement in election administration,” Mitchell said, expressing bafflement at Democrats’ charges that Republicans are trying to suppress votes. “We’re watching two different movies right now.”
      Mitchell’s most public involvement in the voting wars came in participation on Trump’s call to Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, on 2 January. During that call, Mitchell insisted she had evidence of voting fraud, but officials with the secretary of state’s office told her that her data was incorrect.
      Mitchell has two new roles in an emerging conservative voting operation. She’s running a $10m initiative at the limited government group FreedomWorks to both push for new restrictions in voting and help train conservatives to get involved in the nuts and bolts of local elections.
      She’s also a senior legal fellow at the Conservative Partnership Institute, an organization run by former Republican Senator Jim DeMint. She says she’ll use that role to “coordinate” conservative voting positions, particularly in opposition to HR 1.
      Mitchell, 70, has links to other influential players in the conservative movement and serves as outside counsel to the American Legislative Exchange Committee, a conservative group that provides model legislation to state lawmakers and organized a call with state lawmakers and Ted Cruz, the Texas senator, on opposing HR 1.
      Mitchell told the Associated Press she’s been talking regularly with Republican state lawmakers about the need for new election laws. She would not identify whom she speaks with but said it’s been a longtime passion.
      She similarly would not detail her conversations with Trump or say whether they involved the new voting fights. “I’m in touch with the president fairly frequently,” she said of Trump.
      Repeated audits have shown no significant problems with the 2020 election. Trump and his supporters lost more than 50 court cases challenging its results. More

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      Georgia's governor signed 'Jim Crow' voting bill under painting of a slave plantation

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      Sign up for the Guardian’s First Thing newsletterAs a photo of the Georgia governor, Brian Kemp, circulated around the internet, showing the politician signing the sweeping voting restrictions bill while surrounded by other white, male politicians, some Twitter users homed in on a previously undetected detail.The Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch created a Twitter thread about a painting of a Georgia plantation that is hanging behind Kemp in the photograph. Writing about the history of the Callaway plantation in Wilkes county, Georgia, Bunch said the place depicted “thrived because of the back-breaking labor of more than 100 slaves who were held in cruel human bondage”.The columnist, who later published an op-ed about the discovery, said the symbolism of Kemp signing a bill that Joe Biden has referred to as “Jim Crow in the 21st century” is no coincidence.The 98-page Election Integrity Act of 2021 has garnered criticism for the additional ID requirements it has added to absentee voting, and making it a crime for many volunteers to hand out water or food within 150 feet of polling precincts.The practice of handing out food and water became popular as a method of keeping exhausted voters in line at precincts where wait times can span hours. The law also places drop boxes inside voting sites. These drop boxes, which have been in place since last year, will only be accessible during early voting hours instead of 24/7.1. You’ve probably seen this picture of Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp and his gaggle of white men signing the state’s voter suppression law — the new, new Jim Crow. But there’s a shocking angle to this story that you haven’t heard. Sit down for this one… pic.twitter.com/edHPmyeoiu— Will Bunch Sign Up For My Newsletter (@Will_Bunch) March 26, 2021
      “Brian Kemp and his white henchmen have created an image for our times, in working to continue a tradition of inhumanity and white supremacy that now spans centuries, from the human bondage that took place behind the placid scenery of Brickhouse Road in Wilkes county, to the suppression now hidden behind a phony facade of ‘voter integrity’. This legacy is a crime against humanity, and it cannot stand,” Bunch tweeted.The imagery garnered outrage from other people on Twitter, too.The signing of the Georgia Voter Suppression law yesterday was done under the backdrop of Callaway Plantation in Georgia. Having a bunch of white men under a plantation signing a massive voter suppression bill lets everyone know EXACTLY what they want to have happen. https://t.co/QeXMoPqXQj— ProfB (@AntheaButler) March 26, 2021
      Mounted behind white enslavers’ descendants signing a law to make it hard for Black people to vote is Callaway Plantation, a concentration camp where Callaways forced 319 Black Georgians to work free and build southern wealth that gave these men power they’re trying to maintain. pic.twitter.com/kSvFmOF1gM— Uju Anya (@UjuAnya) March 26, 2021
      Thursday’s signing of the law also garnered criticism after a Democratic representative, Park Cannon, was arrested for knocking on the office door as Kemp signed the bill in a closed-door ceremony. More

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      Georgia Law Kicks Off Partisan Battle Over Voting Rights

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      Civil rights groups quickly challenged a new law placing restrictions on voting, while President Biden denounced it as “Jim Crow.” Republicans in other states are determined to follow suit with their own measures.The fight over voting rights is emerging as one of the defining conflicts of the Biden era, and Georgia fired the opening shot with a set of new restrictions underscoring the political, legal and financial clashes that will influence whether Republicans retake Congress and the White House.President Biden on Friday called Georgia’s new law an “attack on the Constitution” and said the Justice Department was “taking a look” at Republican voting efforts in the state, without offering any specifics.“This is Jim Crow in the 21st century, it must end,” Mr. Biden said, a day after Gov. Brian Kemp signed the bill into law. “I will take my case to the American people — including Republicans who joined the broadest coalition of voters ever in this past election to put country before party.“If you have the best ideas, you have nothing to hide. Let the people vote.”Civil rights groups immediately challenged the Georgia law in federal court, backed by prominent Democratic voting rights lawyers. Several Black leaders described the legal skirmishes to come as an existential fight for representation, saying the law clearly puts a target on Black and brown voters. Protests against voting restrictions unfolded this week in state capitols like Austin, Texas, and Atlanta, and more lawsuits are expected.In more than 24 states, Republican-led legislatures are advancing bills in a broad political effort that is the most aggressive attack on the right to vote since the civil rights movement of the 1960s. It follows months of Republican efforts to tarnish Mr. Biden’s presidential victory, which scores of high-level G.O.P. officials still refuse to acknowledge as legitimate.Democrats, who have limited power in many state capitols, are looking to Mr. Biden and congressional Democrats for a new federal law to protect voting. Many in the party see the fight over voting as not just a moral cause but also a political one, given their narrow margins of victory in presidential and Senate elections in Georgia, Arizona and other battlegrounds.Georgia’s sweeping new provisions, passed by a Republican-controlled Legislature, represent the most substantive overhaul of a battleground state’s voting system since last November’s election. It would impose stricter voter identification requirements for absentee balloting, limit drop boxes and forbid giving water and snacks to voters waiting in line.But in a state where former President Donald J. Trump tried to persuade Republican election officials to reverse his loss, the measure went even further: It shifts the power and oversight of elections to the Legislature by stripping the secretary of state from chairing the state Board of Elections and authorizing the Legislature to name members to the board. It further empowers the state Board of Elections to have sweeping jurisdiction over county elections boards, including the authority to suspend officials.Mr. Biden on Friday called Georgia’s new voting restrictions “un-American,” and sought to tie them to the Democrats’ push in Washington to enact the federal voting rights bill, which the House passed this month. The measure would put in place a raft of requirements intended to protect voting rights, including weakening restrictive state identification requirements, expanding early and mail-in voting and restoring voting rights to former felons.The president said the new Georgia law was expressly what the House bill was designed to prevent. While Democrats in Congress debate abolishing the filibuster in order to pass the voting rights bill through the Senate, Republican legislators in more than 40 states have introduced hundreds of bills targeting voting access and seizing authority over administering elections.And another crucial conflict looms this fall: the fights over redistricting to account for growing and changing populations, and the gerrymandering that will allow partisan majorities to limit the impact of votes by packing or splitting up population centers.The gerrymandering disputes will determine the look of the House and dozens of state legislatures, in many cases locking in majorities for the next decade.Gov. Bryan Kemp of Georgia signed the voting bill into law hours after it was passed on Thursday.@GovKemp, via ReutersBitter struggles over voting rights loom even in states with Democratic governors who can veto the legislation. In Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, Republican-controlled legislatures are planning to advance restrictive bills, and new Republican governors would most likely sign them into law if they are elected next year.“The 2020 election is behind us, but the war over the future of our democracy is escalating,” said Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat who is the secretary of state in Michigan, where Republicans this week introduced numerous proposed restrictions on voting. “For anyone to believe that they can sit down and rest because the 2020 election is behind need look no further than what happened in Georgia as an indication that our work is far from over.”Republicans, borrowing language from their previous efforts at curtailing voting access, have described the new bills as a way to make voting easier while limiting fraud. Mr. Kemp, upon signing the bill into law, said it would “make it easier to vote and harder to cheat,” even though the state’s own Republican election officials found no substantive evidence of fraud.Mr. Kemp on Friday pushed back at Mr. Biden’s criticism, saying, “There is nothing ‘Jim Crow’ about requiring a photo or state-issued ID to vote by absentee ballot.”“President Biden, the left and the national media are determined to destroy the sanctity and security of the ballot box,” Mr. Kemp said. “As secretary of state, I consistently led the fight to protect Georgia elections against power-hungry, partisan activists.”Jessica Anderson, the executive director of Heritage Action for America, the political arm of the conservative Heritage Foundation, said Georgia would serve as a model for other Republican-run states.“The country was watching closely what Georgia would do,” Ms. Anderson said in an interview. “The fact that they were able to get these reforms through sets the tone and puts Georgia in a leadership role for other states.”The Justice Department was aware of Georgia’s voting law, a spokeswoman said on Friday, but provided no further comment. A White House official said the president, in his comments, was assuming this was an issue the department would review.The department’s civil rights division would most likely have lawyers investigate whether to file an independent lawsuit, said Tom Perez, the former labor secretary who also previously ran the department’s Civil Rights Division during the Obama administration. It could also take part in the case that was filed by civil rights groups by filing a so-called statement of interest or moving to intervene as the plaintiff, he said.But this is a precarious time for the federal protections in place. In 2013, the Supreme Court gutted one of the core provisions of the Voting Rights Act, clearing the runway for much of the current legislation aimed at restricting voting. The remaining protection, in Section 2 of the act, is facing a new challenge before the Supreme Court, with arguments heard last month.The debate is also spilling over into the corporate arena. Activists across the country have been chastising companies they see as silent on the issue of voting rights. In Georgia on Friday, numerous civil rights groups and faith leaders issued a call to boycott some of the standard-bearers of the Georgia business community — including Coca-Cola — until they took action against the effort to restrict voting access.The early battle lines are increasingly centering on two key states that flipped from Republican to Democratic in 2020, Arizona and Georgia. Those states are also home to large populations of voters of color, who have historically faced discriminatory laws at the polls.Two battleground states that remained in Republican control in 2020 — Texas and Florida — are also moving forward with new laws restricting voting.A drive-through voting station in Houston in October. Bills being considered by the Texas Legislature would ban the practice.Go Nakamura for The New York TimesIn Florida, lawmakers are looking to ban drop boxes and limit who can collect ballots for other voters, among other provisions, even after an election that the Republican chair of the state party touted as the “gold standard” and that Republicans won handily.Blaise Ingoglia, a Republican state representative who has sponsored some of the legislation, said that while the election was successful, it was “not without challenges and problems that we think we needed to fix.” He cited the use of ballot drop boxes, which he helped write into law but he said were not adequately being administered.“They said the same thing with the last election bill, that we wrote it and they said it was voter suppression, and the exact opposite happened: We had more people vote in the state of Florida than ever before,” he said. “We have 40 days of election with three different ways to vote. How can anyone say voter suppression?”In Arizona, Republican lawmakers have advanced legislation that would drop voters who skip consecutive election cycles from the permanent early voting list. The list currently consists of roughly 3.2 million voters, and critics of the legislation estimate it would purge roughly 100,000 voters.Lawmakers in Florida are seeking to limit drop boxes for ballots.Eve Edelheit for The New York TimesWisconsin Republicans have proposed many restrictions on the disabled, new limits on who can automatically receive an absentee ballot and a requirement that absentee voters provide photo identification for every election — as opposed to having one on file with their municipal clerk.The measures are certain to be vetoed by Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, but their sponsor, the Republican State Senator Duey Stroebel, said Friday that the legislation would encapsulate the party’s principles heading into the midterm elections.“It will define that we as Republicans are people who want clean and fair elections in the state,” Mr. Stroebel said. Wisconsin Democrats, confident in Mr. Evers’s veto, are eager to have a voting rights fight be front and center ahead of the 2022 elections, said State Senator Kelda Roys, a Democrat.“People hate the idea that their right to vote is under attack,” Ms. Roys said. “The freedom to vote is just popular. It’s a great issue for Democrats.”The torrent of Republican voting legislation, Democrats say, undermines faith in elections.“Even in states where they won’t be passed and have been introduced, like in Colorado, they’re dangerous,” said Jena Griswold, the secretary of state in Colorado. “The rhetoric of lying and trying to manipulate Americans to keep political power is dangerous. It led to all the death threats that secretaries of state and election officials received in 2020. It led to the insurrection.”Reporting was contributed by More

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      Why the Georgia G.O.P.’s Voting Rollbacks Will Hit Black People Hard

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      The state’s new Republican-crafted law is set to restrict voting access in ways that Democrats and voting rights groups say will have an outsize impact on Black voters.After record turnout flipped Georgia blue for the first time in decades, Republicans who control the state Legislature moved swiftly to put in place a raft of new restrictions on voting access, passing a new bill that was signed into law on Thursday.The law will alter foundational elements of voting in Georgia, which supported President Biden in November and a pair of Democratic senators in January — narrow victories attributable in part to the turnout of Black voters and the array of voting options in the state.Taken together, the new barriers will have an outsize impact on Black voters, who make up roughly one-third of the state’s population and vote overwhelmingly Democratic.The Republican legislation will undermine pillars of voting access by limiting drop boxes for mail ballots, introducing more rigid voter identification requirements for absentee balloting and making it a crime to provide food or water to people waiting in line to vote. Long lines to vote are common in Black neighborhoods in Georgia’s cities, particularly Atlanta, where much of the state’s Democratic electorate lives.The new law also expands the Legislature’s power over elections, which has raised worries that it could interfere with the vote in predominantly Democratic, heavily Black counties like Fulton and Gwinnett.Black voters were a major force in Democratic success in recent elections, with roughly 88 percent voting for Mr. Biden and more than 90 percent voting for Senators Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff in the January runoff elections, according to exit polls.Democrats say that Republicans are effectively returning to one of the ugliest tactics in the state’s history — oppressive laws aimed at disenfranchising voters.“Rather than grappling with whether their ideology is causing them to fail, they are instead relying on what has worked in the past,” Stacey Abrams, the voting rights activist, said as the bill made its way through the Legislature, referring to what she said were laws designed to suppress votes. “Instead of winning new voters, you rig the system against their participation, and you steal the right to vote.”The Georgia law comes as former President Donald J. Trump has continued to publicly promote the lie that the election was stolen from him, which has swayed millions of Republican voters. It also puts further pressure on Republican state legislatures across the country to continue drafting new legislation aimed at restricting voting rights under the banner of “election integrity” as a way of appeasing the former president and his loyal base.People waited in line to vote early at a community center in Suwanee, Ga., in October.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesNew restrictions on voting have already passed in Iowa, and multiple other states are lining up similar efforts, while the Supreme Court signaled this month that it was ready to make it harder to challenge all sorts of limits on voting around the nation.Should the high court make changes to Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which allows after-the-fact challenges to voting restrictions that may disproportionately affect members of minority groups, Democrats and voting rights groups could be left without one of their most essential tools to challenge new laws.For decades, Georgia has been at the center of the voting rights battle, with Democrats and advocacy groups fighting back against repeated efforts to disenfranchise Black voters in the state.As recently as 2018, Georgians faced hourslong lines to vote in many predominantly Black neighborhoods, and thousands of Black voters were purged from the voting rolls before the election. Now Republicans have again changed the state’s voting laws ahead of critical Senate and governor’s races in 2022.Democrats, shut out of power in the Statehouse despite holding both United States Senate seats, were relatively powerless in the legislative process to stop the voting bill, though they do now have avenues through the courts to challenge the law.The initial iterations of the bill contained measures that voting rights groups said would have even more directly targeted Black voters, like a proposal to restrict early voting on the weekends that would limit the longstanding civic tradition of “Souls to the Polls,” in which Black voters cast ballots on Sunday after church services.Stacey Abrams, the voting rights activist and 2018 Democratic nominee for governor, may challenge Gov. Brian Kemp again in 2022.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesIn an interview earlier this month, Ms. Abrams, the former Democratic minority leader in the Georgia House of Representatives, called Republicans’ effort “a sign of fear” over their failure to win support from young and minority voters, two of the fastest-growing sectors of the state’s electorate.She added that the measure was also potentially self-defeating for the G.O.P. in that large percentages of rural white voters, a traditionally Republican-leaning bloc, could also be impeded by laws that make it harder for citizens to cast absentee ballots and vote by mail.Republicans have defended the new measures, saying they are focused on election security. In remarks on Thursday after signing the new law, Gov. Brian Kemp said that after the 2020 election, “we quickly began working with the House and Senate on further reforms to make it easier to vote and harder to cheat.” He added, “The bill I signed into law does just that.”Isabella Grullón Paz contributed reporting. More

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      Georgia G.O.P. Passes Major Law to Limit Voting

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      The law, which has been denounced by Democrats and voting rights groups, comes as Republican-controlled legislatures across the country mount the most extensive contraction of ballot access in generations.Georgia Republicans on Thursday passed a sweeping law to restrict voting access in the state, introducing more rigid voter identification requirements for absentee balloting, limiting drop boxes and expanding the Legislature’s power over elections. The new measures make Georgia the first major battleground to overhaul its election system since the turmoil of last year’s presidential contest. The legislation, which followed Democratic victories that flipped the state at the presidential and Senate levels, comes amid a national movement among Republican-controlled state legislatures to mount the most extensive contraction of voting access in generations. Seeking to appease a conservative base that remains incensed about the results of the 2020 election, Republicans have already passed a similar law in Iowa, and are moving forward with efforts to restrict voting in states including Arizona, Florida and Texas.Democrats and voting rights groups have condemned such efforts, arguing that they unfairly target voters of color. They say the new law in Georgia particularly seeks to make voting harder for the state’s large Black population, which was crucial to President Biden’s triumph in Georgia in November and the success of Senators Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff in the January runoff elections.Mr. Biden joined Georgia Democrats on Thursday in denouncing efforts to limit voting, calling Republicans’ push around the country “the most pernicious thing.”“This makes Jim Crow look like Jim Eagle,” he said at his first formal news conference since taking office.Though the law is less stringent than the initial iterations of the bill, it introduces a raft of new restrictions for voting and elections in the state, including limiting drop boxes, stripping the secretary of state of some of his authority, imposing new oversight of county election boards, restricting who can vote with provisional ballots, and making it a crime to offer food or water to voters waiting in lines. The law also requires runoff elections to be held four weeks after the original vote, instead of the current nine weeks.The law does not include some of the harshest restrictions that had been proposed, like a ban on Sunday voting that was seen as an attempt to curtail the role of Black churches in driving turnout. And the legislation now, in fact, expands early voting options in some areas. No-excuse absentee voting, in which voters do not have to provide a rationale for casting a ballot by mail, also remains in place, though it will now entail new restrictions such as providing a state-issued identification card.State Representative Alan Powell, a Republican, spoke in favor of the voting bill on Thursday.Alyssa Pointer/Atlanta Journal-Constitution, via Associated PressThe law passed the Georgia House on Thursday morning by a party-line vote of 100 to 75, and was approved by the Senate in the evening on a 34-to-20 vote before being signed by Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican.In brief remarks on Thursday evening, Mr. Kemp said the drafting of the bill had started after the 2020 election. “We quickly began working with the House and Senate on further reforms to make it easier to vote and harder to cheat,” he said. “The bill I signed into law does just that.” The governor, who is up for re-election in 2022 and was heavily criticized by Donald J. Trump after the election for not abetting the former president’s effort to subvert the outcome, detailed his own history as a secretary of state fighting for stronger voter identification laws, which Democrats have denounced as having an outsize impact on communities of color. Mr. Kemp said that protests against the bill were pure politics. “I fought these partisan activists tooth and nail for over 10 years to keep our elections secure, accessible and fair,” Mr. Kemp said. Georgia has quickly become fiercely contested political territory, and a focal point of the continuing clashes over voting rights. During the contentious months after the November election, the state became a particular obsession of Mr. Trump, who spun falsehoods, lies and conspiracy theories about electoral fraud and pressured election officials, including the Republican secretary of state, to “find” him votes.Yet after election officials rebuffed Mr. Trump, and multiple audits reaffirmed the results, Republican legislators held hearings on the election, inviting some of the president’s allies like Rudolph W. Giuliani to speak. After the hearings, G.O.P. lawmakers promised to introduce new legislation to help “restore confidence” in elections, even though the last one had been held safely and securely.Outside the Statehouse in Atlanta on Thursday, a coalition of Black faith leaders assembled a protest, voicing their opposition to the bill and calling for a boycott of major corporations in Georgia that they said had remained silent on the voting push, including Coca-Cola.The faith leaders also sought a meeting with Mr. Kemp and Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan, also a Republican. Mr. Duncan met with the group for three minutes; Mr. Kemp did not.“I told him exactly how I felt: that these bills were not only voter suppression, but they were in fact racist, and they are an attempt to turn back time to Jim Crow,” said Bishop Reginald T. Jackson, who oversees all African Methodist Episcopal churches in the state.The voting legislation’s approval in the House on Thursday morning came after an impassioned debate on the floor of the chamber.Erica Thomas, a Democratic state representative from outside Atlanta, opened her remarks by recalling the memory of former Representative John Lewis of Georgia, the civil rights leader who died last year. She quoted an old speech of his before voicing her opposition to the bill.“Why do we rally, why do we protest voter suppression?” she said. “It is because our ancestors are looking down right now on this House floor, praying and believing that our fight, and that their fight, was not in vain. We call on the strength of Congressman John Lewis in this moment. Because right now, history is watching.”Demonstrators protesting Georgia’s bill of voting restrictions in Atlanta on Thursday.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesOther Democrats said the bill was rooted in the election falsehoods that have been spread by Mr. Trump and his allies.“Where is the need for this bill coming from?” said Debbie Buckner, a Democratic representative from near Columbus. “From the former president who wanted the election fixed and thrown out, even when Georgia leadership told him they couldn’t do it if they wanted to.”Representative Zulma Lopez, who represents a majority-minority district on the outskirts of Atlanta, said the bill would have an outsize impact on voters of color. In her district, she said, the number of drop boxes would be reduced to nine from 33. This was partly the result, she said, of Democrats’ being excluded from discussions.“Close to 2.5 million Democrats voted in the general election in 2020,” Ms. Lopez said. “Yet Democrats in this House were left out of any meaningful input into the drafting of this bill.”Democratic state senators sounded similar alarms during an afternoon debate.“It is like a Christmas tree of goodies for voter suppression,” said State Senator Jen Jordan, a Democrat from near Atlanta. “And let’s be clear, some of the most dangerous provisions have to do with the takeover of the local elections boards.”In a sign of the high tensions in Georgia, Mr. Kemp’s speech was abruptly cut off after about 10 minutes. A Democratic state representative, Park Cannon, had tried to attend the signing and remarks, but the doors to the governor’s office were closed. After officers would not let her enter, Ms. Cannon lightly knocked on the door. Two officers immediately detained her, placing in her handcuffs and escorting her through the State Capitol. Neither Ms. Cannon nor the governor’s office immediately responded to requests for comment. Alan Powell, a Republican representative from northeastern Georgia, defended the state’s bill, saying it would bring needed uniformity to an electoral system that was pushed to the brink last year.“The Georgia election system was never made to be able to handle the volume of votes that it handled,” he said. (Multiple audits affirmed the results of Georgia’s elections last year, and there were no credible reports of any fraud or irregularities that would have affected the results.) “What we’ve done in this bill in front of you is we have cleaned up the workings, the mechanics of our election system.”“Show me the suppression,” Mr. Powell said. “There is no suppression in this bill.”The law is likely to be met by legal challenges from Democratic groups, and voting rights organizations have vowed to continue to work against the provisions.Bishop Jackson said he would be working with his constituents to make sure that they had the proper identification, registered in time, and knew how to vote under the new rules.“This is a fight,” he said. “I think we’re probably at halftime. I think we got another half to go.”Thomas Kaplan More

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      Georgia's Republican-led legislature passes sweeping voting restrictions

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      Georgia lawmakers on Thursday gave final approval to legislation to impose sweeping new restrictions on voting access in the state that make it harder to vote by mail and give the state legislature more power over elections.The measure was signed into law by Governor Brian Kemp, a Republican, on Thursday evening. “Significant reforms to our state elections were needed. There’s no doubt there were many alarming issues with how the election was handled, and those problems, understandably, led to a crisis of confidence,” Kemp said during prepared remarks shortly after signing the bill.It requires voters to submit ID information with both an absentee ballot request and the ballot itself. It limits the use of absentee ballot drop boxes, allows for unlimited challenges to a voter’s qualifications, cuts the runoff election period from nine to four weeks, and significantly shortens the amount of time voters have to request an absentee ballot.Sign up for the Guardian’s Fight to Vote newsletterThe legislation also empowers the state legislature, currently dominated by Republicans, to appoint a majority of members on the five-person state election board. That provision would strip Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, a Republican who stood up to Trump after the election, from his current role as chairman of the board. The bill creates a mechanism for the board to strip local election boards of their power.Gloria Butler, a Democratic state senator, said the bill would make it harder to vote, especially for poor and disabled people. “We are witnessing a massive and unabashed assault on voting rights unlike anything we’ve seen since the Jim Crow era,” she said just before the bill passed.“This bill is absolutely about opportunities, but it isn’t about opportunities to vote. It is about the opportunity to keep control and keep power at any cost,” Jen Jordan, a Democratic state senator, said on Thursday.Park Cannon, a Democratic state representative, was arrested on Thursday after knocking on the door of the governor’s office during a protests against the legislation’s signing. Video captured by a bystander shows Cannon, who is Black, handcuffed with her arms behind her back and being forcibly removed from the state Capitol by two officers, one on each arm. She says, “Where are you taking me?” and, “Stop” as she is taken from the building.The legislation comes after Georgia saw record turnout in the November election and January US Senate runoffs, including surges among Black and other minority voters. It has become the center of national attention because many see it as a crystallization of a national push by Republicans to make it harder to vote. Alluding to a measure in the Georgia bill that bans providing food or water to people standing in line to vote, Joe Biden called that national effort “sick” during a Thursday press conference. “This makes Jim Crow look like Jim Eagle,” he said.Facing opposition from top Republicans in the state, Republicans dropped a push to require voters to give an excuse to vote by mail. And amid national outcry, they backed away in recent weeks from proposals to prohibit early voting on Sundays, a day that Black voters have traditionally used in disproportionate numbers to cast ballots. The measure that passed on Thursday actually expands weekend early voting in the state, requiring an additional Saturday and authorizing counties to offer it on two Sundays if they choose.Republicans seized on that provision in the bill on Thursday to claim that they were actually expanding voter access in Georgia. “The bill greatly expands the accessibility of voters in Georgia and greatly improves the process of administration of elections while at the same time providing more accountability to provide that the vote is properly preserved,” Barry Fleming, a GOP state representative who spearheaded the legislation, said on Thursday.They offered little substantive justification for why the measure was necessary after an election in which there was record turnout, and in which multiple recounts in the presidential race found no evidence of fraud. Instead, they said the bill was necessary to preserve voter confidence.The nearly 100-page measure was only formally unveiled last week, when it was abruptly inserted into another two-page bill. While the legislation includes several of the measures lawmakers debated, it included some new ideas that had not been fully debated. Democrats and voting activists have accused Republicans of trying to ram through a bill without fully vetting it.Democrats and voting rights groups are expected to swiftly file a slew of lawsuits challenging the measure.The Associated Press contributed reporting More

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      Georgia activists call for Coca-Cola boycott over ‘deafening silence’ on voting rights

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      Georgia activists are calling for a statewide boycott of Coca-Cola as part of an escalating effort to get major corporations to oppose significant voting restrictions Republicans in the state legislature are on the verge of approving.Sign up for the Guardian’s Fight to Vote newsletterThe call for the boycott, first reported by the Atlanta Journal Constitution, is coming from leaders of the sixth district of the AME church, which includes more than 500 Black churches in Georgia. Bishop Reginald Thomas Jackson, the presiding prelate, said that there had been a “deafening silence” around voting rights from Coca-Cola and other companies that had put out statements last year supporting the Black Lives Matter movement.“Our position is they’ve not lived up to their own words. By your silence you’re actually being complicit. So we’re going to say to them, if you want our money, then you ought to have our back,” he said in an interview. He added that he expected other civil rights groups to join in the boycott calls soon.For weeks, activists have been placing pressure on Coca-Cola, as well as Delta Airlines, Home Depot, Aflac, UPS, and Southern Company – all based in Georgia – to use their political clout to oppose bills in the legislature that would require voters to provide ID information when they vote by mail, limit the availability of absentee drop boxes and give the state legislature more power to meddle in local election boards, among other measures.But those major companies have declined to speak out directly against the bills. The Georgia chamber of commerce released a statement earlier this month saying it had “concern and opposition” to provisions in the legislation. The Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce has been a little more specific, saying earlier this month it was focused on addressing weekend absentee voting, drop boxes and ID requirements.Coca-Cola told the Guardian earlier this month it supported both chambers of commerce and a “balanced approach to elections”. A spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the boycott.Georgia lawmakers will probably hammer out a final version of sweeping voting changes before the legislative session ends next week. While they walked back an effort to cut weekend early voting, they still have left sweeping restrictions in bills that civil rights groups say are a blatant effort to suppress votes.Jackson said he plans to lead a protest at the Georgia capitol on Thursday and did not rule out calling on boycotts of the other major companies.“Boycotting is not something we really want to do,” he said. “Coca-Cola is a fine company. But at the same time, we think all of these major companies have responsibilities on issues of social justice.” More

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      in Elections

      Republicans Aim to Seize More Power Over How Elections Are Run

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      G.O.P. lawmakers in at least eight states controlled by the party are trying to gain broad influence over the mechanics of voting, in an effort that could further undermine the country’s democratic norms.In the turbulent aftermath of the 2020 presidential contest, election officials in Georgia, from the secretary of state’s office down to county boards, found themselves in a wholly unexpected position: They had to act as one of the last lines of defense against an onslaught of efforts by a sitting president and his influential allies to overturn the will of the voters.Now state Republicans are trying to strip these officials of their power.Buried in an avalanche of voting restrictions currently moving through the Georgia Statehouse are measures that would give G.O.P. lawmakers wide-ranging influence over the mechanics of voting and fundamentally alter the state’s governance of elections. The bill, which could clear the House as soon as Thursday and is likely to be passed by the Senate next week, would allow state lawmakers to seize control of county election boards and erode the power of the secretary of state’s office.“It’s looking at total control of the election process by elected officials, which is not what it should be,” said Helen Butler, a Democratic county board of elections member. “It’s all about turnout and trying to retain power.”It’s not just Georgia. In Arizona, Republicans are pushing for control over the rules of the state’s elections. In Iowa, the G.O.P. has installed harsh new criminal penalties for county election officials who enact emergency voting rules. In Tennessee, a Republican legislator is trying to remove a sitting judge who ruled against the party in an election case.Nationwide, Republican lawmakers in at least eight states controlled by the party are angling to pry power over elections from secretaries of state, governors and nonpartisan election boards.The maneuvers risk adding an overtly partisan skew to how electoral decisions are made each year, threatening the fairness that is the bedrock of American democracy. The push is intertwined with Republicans’ extraordinary national drive to make it harder for millions of Americans to vote, with legislative and legal attacks on early voting, absentee balloting and automatic voter registration laws.“Republicans are brazenly trying to seize local and state election authority in an unprecedented power grab,” said Stacey Abrams, the Democratic voting rights advocate who served as the minority leader in the Georgia State House. She said it was “intended to alter election outcomes and remove state and county election officials who refuse to put party above the people.”She added, “Had their grand plan been law in 2020, the numerous attempts by state legislatures to overturn the will of the voters would have succeeded.”As Mr. Trump carried out his pressure campaign to try to overturn the election results in swing states, he found many sympathetic lawmakers willing to go along with him — but he was rebuffed by numerous election officials, as well as state and federal courts.The new legislation across the country would systematically remove the checks that stood in Mr. Trump’s way, injecting new political influence over electors, county election boards and the certification process. In doing so, the Republican effort places a few elected officials who refused to buy into the lies and falsehoods about the election in its cross hairs.One of those officials is Brad Raffensperger, the Republican secretary of state of Georgia, who rebuffed Mr. Trump in the face of mounting pressure to falsely declare the election rife with fraud, despite multiple audits that affirmed the outcome.In Georgia’s new voting bill, the State Legislature is looking to strip Mr. Raffensperger of his role as the chair of the State Election Board and make him an ex-officio member without a vote.Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, repeatedly rejected Donald J. Trump’s entreaties to help him overturn the election results.Audra Melton for The New York TimesBut perhaps more consequential is Republicans’ targeting of county election boards. If the bill becomes law, the State Election Board, under control of the Legislature, would have more authority over these county boards, including the ability to review and fire their members.“It will give the State Election Board the authority to replace a limited number, it appears, of county election superintendents, and that can be a very partisan tool in the wrong hands,” said David Worley, the sole Democratic member of the five-person state board.The provision has worried Democratic officials in major left-leaning counties like Fulton County, which is home to Atlanta, and Gwinnett County, as well as their surrounding suburbs. They fear that a partisan state board influenced by the Legislature may enact more restrictive policies for their counties, which are home to the majority of the Democratic voters in the state and a large concentration of the state’s Black voters.Jon Greenbaum, the chief counsel for the nonpartisan Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said Republicans were engaged in an “all-out effort to change the voting rules in lots of ways that would allow for greater opportunity for them to challenge the eligibility of electors,” and that the party would “add micromanagement by state legislatures to the process of running an election.”State Representative Barry Fleming, a Republican who has been a chief sponsor of the bills in Georgia, did not respond to requests for comment. In a hearing on the bill this month, he defended the provisions, saying, “We as legislators decide how we will actually be elected, because we decide our own boards of elections and those of the counties we are elected from.”Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia, a Republican, has not weighed in publicly on the changes to election administration and oversight. Asked for comment, his office offered only that he was in favor of “strengthened voter ID protections.”At the local level, at least nine Republican counties in Georgia have passed local legislation since November dissolving their current election boards — often composed of three Republicans and two Democrats — and replacing them with a new membership entirely appointed by the county commissioner, resulting in single-party boards.A new law in Iowa restricting access to voting also targeted county election officials. In addition to barring them from proactively sending out absentee ballot applications, the bill introduced criminal charges for officials who fail to follow the new voting rules.The threat of increased punishment seemed to be directed at three county election officials in the state, who last year chose to mail absentee ballot applications to all registered voters in their counties, drawing the ire of state Republicans.“We can be fined heavily now, removed from office,” said one of those officials, Travis Weipert, the Johnson County auditor. “And instead of just saying, ‘Don’t do it again,’ they brought the hammer down on us.”He joked on Facebook that he would be setting up a GoFundMe page because “I have a pretty good idea which auditors will be fined first.”Election officials checked information on absentee ballot envelopes in Newton, Iowa, in October. A new law in the state restricting access to voting has targeted county election officials. Kathryn Gamble for The New York TimesBobby Kaufmann, the Republican state representative in Iowa who sponsored the voting bill, said the county auditors’ actions were “as much the inspiration for the bill as anything,” pointing to their decisions to mail out ballots with prepopulated information.“There were multiple things that these county auditors did to take the law into their own hands, which is why we put these strict punishments and oversight in for auditors that go beyond the scope of their job,” Mr. Kaufmann said, referring to the auditors who proactively mailed ballots. “That’s the role of the Legislature, not the role of an auditor.”In Arizona, the Republican-controlled Legislature is pursuing multiple paths to tip the scales of election oversight. One bill gives the Legislature the authority to approve the state election manual, an essential planning document that is drawn up every two years by the secretary of state. It had previously been approved by the governor and the attorney general.The effort has been roundly criticized by election officials in the state.“They don’t serve any purpose, except for the Legislature just trying to insert themselves into the process, create obstruction, and say that they did something in the name of election integrity without actually doing anything that does that,” said Katie Hobbs, the Democratic secretary of state in Arizona.Ms. Hobbs, who was the target of many Republican attacks after the 2020 election, said that purely partisan politics were at play in the bills.“The Legislature wasn’t interested in control over elections until I got here and happened to have a ‘D’ by my name,” she said.Michelle Ugenti-Rita, a Republican state senator who has been a sponsor of many of the bills, did not respond to a request for comment.Republicans are also introducing measures to give them more electoral oversight in some states, like Michigan and New Jersey, that have Democratic governors who would most likely veto such bills. In North Carolina, which also has a Democratic governor, Republican legislators have publicly discussed introducing a similar bill, but have not yet done so.Efforts in other states to muddle with the mechanics of elections have gone beyond state legislatures. In Michigan, the state Republican Party has indicated that it is unlikely to ask a G.O.P. member of the State Board of Canvassers who chose to certify last year’s election results to return to his post.That member, Aaron Van Langevelde, sided with the two Democrats on the state board in November, clearing the path for Michigan’s Electoral College votes to be awarded to President Biden.If Mr. Van Langevelde is ousted from the board, election officials in Michigan worry that the state Republican Party may again seek to hold up certification of a statewide election and possibly succeed, regardless of the success and security of the vote.It is nearly assured that almost all of these bills will face legal challenges from Democrats, who have signaled that combating the efforts to restrict voting will be a top priority through both federal legislation and the courts.And Democrats could find a path to challenging some of these laws in deep-red Kansas.That state’s Republican-led Legislature put forward a proposal similar to those in Georgia and Arizona, seeking to limit the authority of the secretary of state to make emergency decisions and provisions for elections. But the Republican secretary of state, Scott Schwab, informed the Legislature that the proposal “could run afoul” of federal voting laws regarding military and overseas voters.The legislation was quickly amended the next day. More