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Barriers for Young Voters
SHORTENED RUNOFF REPRESENTS A CHALLENGE FOR EARLY VOTING
By Stanley Dunlap news@flagpole.com
G eorgia Tech junior Alex Ames said
that the state’s new voting law put
some of her college friends in a bind
when their absentee ballots did not arrive
in time to be counted for the midterm elec
tions on Nov. 8.
Ames was among a group of college stu
dents and a coalition of voting rights orga
nizations imploring local election officials
to expand the access to the ballot box in
the Dec. 6 U.S. Senate runoff, which is in a
condensed window that overlaps with final
exams and the holiday break.
The Dec. 6 runoff pitting Democratic
Sen. Raphael Warnock against Republican
Herschel Walker provides another example
of how the state’s voting law overhaul in
2021 is changing how elections are run.
In the Nov. 8 midterm, there was record
m
early voter turnout for a Georgia midterm , OO
and the turnout for voters under 30 across §
the country was the second highest for a p
midterm in at least three decades. Ames n:
said that college students and other young m
adults are highly energized for the election
despite some of the barriers now in place
that make it harder to vote.
As a result of Georgia’s Senate Bill
202 voting law, the window for request
ing and returning absentee ballots was
shortened, and the runoff schedule was
compressed from nine weeks to four weeks
after Election Day, reducing early voting
opportunities. The Senate runoff that will
begin in most places on Nov. 28 won’t
offer Saturday early voting, since it occurs
just after Thanksgiving and a state holi
day once dedicated to honor Confederate
general Robert E. Lee’s birthday. However,
Democrats are suing to allow early voting
on the Saturday after Thanksgiving, arguing
that the law doesn’t apply to runoffs.
Ames, an organizer with the Georgia
Youth Justice Coalition, was joined by other
activists last week in recommending that
county election officials offer a Sunday
early voting day, extend the weekday hours
and open up polling stations on college
campuses for the runoff. She said that she
has friends in Oregon who returned their
Georgia absentee ballots as soon as they
were mailed to them, but the ballots didn’t
arrive in time to be counted. The Athens-
Clarke County Board of Elections is among
those that have scheduled a day of early
voting on Sunday, Nov. 27.
“I have a friend in Washington D.C.
who had to pay for a flight back home on
Election Day because when they requested
their ballot it had not arrived,” Ames said
during a press conference hosted at Georgia
Tech by Progress Georgia and Georgia
Organizers for Active Transformation. “I
have friends at Georgia Tech who had to
miss a day of class to drive back home to
vote in their districts.
“Vote by mail is a critical option that
should be available to every voter to cast
their ballots, especially since this runoff
coincides with final exams, the end of the
semester and holiday,” Ames said.
According to the secretary of state’s
office, more than 244,000 absentee ballots
were cast for this year’s midterm, up from
2018’s midterm count of 223,000. As a
result of the pandemic, state election offi
cials adopted emergency rules during the
2020 presidential election, which resulted
in more than 1.2 million absentee ballots
being cast by mail and drop boxes.
Gabriel Sterling, chief operating officer
for the secretary of state, said that the
shortened runoff time to four weeks was
the standard for many years in Georgia
until a federal lawsuit changed it to nine
weeks to give more time for overseas and
military ballots. Georgia officials were able
to run a successful midterm because of
changes from SB 202, court rulings and the
State Election Board, he said.
Young Democrats held an event at UGA’s Tate
Center last month urging students to vote early, but
some say that will be a challenge for the Senate
runoff with just five days of advance voting.
“If you remember, Paul Coverdell was
elected in a four-week runoff, and Saxby
[Chambliss] had a four-week runoff,”
Sterling said about the former U.S. senators
at a Nov. 9 press conference. “The state has
executed four-week runoffs in the past,
with early voting, with no-excuse absentee
and with Election Day voting. This is not
the first time we’ve had to do this. This is
not that unique.”
When Republican Donald Trump
lost several key battleground states like
Georgia, unfounded claims of a stolen 2020
presidential election persisted through this
year’s midterm. This resulted in a wave of
misinformation and major changes to state
election laws, which Republicans claim
restored integrity and Democrats and civil
rights organizations claim disenfranchised
Black voters, young people and other mar
ginalized groups with new restrictions.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad
Raffensperger said that as local election
workers prepare for the quick turnaround
for the runoff, that the midterm election
proves that they can perform at the highest
level. Across the state there was an average
two minutes wait time for the 1.4 million
voters who came out on Election Day. The
new voting law requires local elections to
have wait times less than one hour. And a
controversial provision made it illegal to
provide water or other refreshments to vot
ers standing in line.
The secretary of state’s office says that
there were no major problems reported on
a new texting line for poll works to report
any threats to staff and voters or other
problems that surfaced in Georgia’s recent
elections.
“I read online that there was a person
who wanted to test our line warming law,
so he loaded his car with boxes and cases
of bottled water to get the voters in line,”
Raffensperger said at a press conference
this month at the state Capitol. “He started
driving around, and his problem was he
couldn’t find any lines. And he even said
in the article, "The system is running so
smoothly today that no one lined up in the
sun.’
“The credit for that goes to the counties
and it goes to the voters,” Raffensperger
said. “The voters took record advantage of
pre-Election Day voting. They shattered the
records for both absentee by mail and early
in-person voting in a midterm.”
Georgia’s relatively glitch-free election
was a similar experience for the majority of
voters across the country with voting rights
advocates and state election administrators
reporting few, if any, major problems.
Georgia’s early voting numbers of 2.5
million ballots cast by Nov. 4 were 20%
higher than the previous record in the 2018
midterms, leading to projections from state
officials that another 2 million Georgians
could show up at the polls on Election Day.
Progressive voting rights groups point
out the new law explicitly allowing Georgia
voters to challenge voter eligibility an
unlimited number of times was a way to
encourage situations like 65,000 voters who
had their registration status questioned in
the Nov. 8 midterm.
Raffensperger has said that he’d like to
see the state legislature revamp that sec
tion of the law in order to prevent the large
mass challenges like in Gwinnett County
where the local county election board
rejected the majority of 37,000 complaints.
In Gwinnett, 10 election workers combed
through challenges and found many eligible
college students, seniors and disabled vot
ers. No voters were challenged in Athens,
according to Director of Elections and Voter
Registration Charlotte Sosebee.
Upon arriving at the polls, some Georgia
voters were informed that their eligibility
had been officially challenged, forcing them
to cast a provisional ballot. The new election
rules also prohibited the counting of pro
visional ballots if a voter showed up at the
wrong precinct before 5 p.m. on Election
Day. The number of provisional ballots cast
this year was a little over 10,000, down
from over 12,000 in the 2018 midterm.
A report from the International Office of
Democratic Institutions and Human Rights
said that, while voter challenges can be one
way to remedy and correct inaccuracies in
the voter list, such mass challenges in states
like Georgia and Michigan raised concerns
about potential voter suppression. The
Poland-based organization set up obser
vation teams in multiple states, including
Georgia, for the midterm elections.
“The Nov. 8 midterm congressional elec
tions were competitive and professionally
managed, with active voter participation,”
the report said, “However, the noted efforts
to undermine voters’ trust in the elec
toral process by baselessly questioning its
integrity can result in systemic challenges.
Campaigning was free but highly polarized
and marred by harsh rhetoric. In many
cases, partisan redistricting resulted in
uncompetitive constituencies.” ©
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