Democrats in Towns and Union Counties urged to educate voters on new voting law

Democrats in Northeast Georgia need to mitigate the damage done by recent changes to Georgia’s voting laws by educating them on how the changes will affect their right to vote, Mike Cobb, vice chair for voter protection in the Ninth Congressional District, told a gathering of Democrats from Towns and Union counties on May 13.

Cobb’s job is to help individual counties assemble task forces to carry out mitigation and education efforts in the 20 counties of the ninth district. He also serves as second vice chair of the Fannin County Democratic Committee and said each county is encouraged to organize either a task force, as Fannin is doing, or subcommittee with responsibility for education efforts.

“We call ours a ‘task force’ for a reason. We plan to get things done and are action-oriented,” he said.

Towns County Democratic Chair Charlotte Sleczkowski said Towns County Democrats will be participating in this statewide effort led by the Democratic Party of Georgia and will establish task forces to carry out plans to help local voters navigate this new system. Towns Democrats will meet next on Thursday, June 10.

Three areas where changes will affect local voters are in absentee voting procedures, early in-person and polling-day voting, and how county boards of election will be managed and overseen by the State Election Board, he said.

“These are onerous and draconian provisions,” he said, describing the changes. “The Democratic Party of Georgia has scoured SB 202 and looked for ways to mitigate [its effect on voters] and mobilize registration and get out the vote efforts.”

Changes to absentee voting will reduce the time voters have to apply for an absentee ballot to a narrow window beginning 78 days and ending 11 days before an election, he said. Voters are used to the application period opening 180 days before an election and may not realize the earlier closing date means they can no longer apply for an absentee ballot as late as the Friday before an election.

Also, voters will have to include either a driver’s license number or a Georgia voter identification card number on the application. In the past the voter’s signature was sufficient. Voters without these forms of identification will have to submit a photocopy of one of the other authorized forms of photo identification specified in the law.

For Union and Towns counties, which in the 2020 election had only one absentee ballot dropbox, new restrictions on the availability of drop boxes will have little effect. However, the dropboxes will not be as convenient since they can no longer be located outside and thus available when convenient for the voter. Instead, the boxes must be inside a polling place or government building, be monitored, and will be available only during business hours.

“Dropbox availability will be a huge issue,” he said, since it will affect the ability of people who work during the day to turn in their absentee ballot. Additionally, a third party can no longer legally drop off an absentee voter’s ballot, Cobb said.

One offset to the restrictions imposed by SB 202 is expansion of early in-person voting, he said. Voters will have two mandatory Saturday voting hours and election boards have the option to have polls open for two Sundays.

However, voters who go to the wrong precinct will no longer be able to cast a provisional ballot unless they show up after 5 p.m. on polling day. This will affect the ability of people to vote. “Polling places change, and voters may not realize their precinct polling place is different. We have to educate voters, so they know where to vote,” Cobb said.

SB 202 hands the Republican-controlled legislature control over the State Election Board, he said. The State Election Board now has the power to suspend up to four county election officials and take over the local election.

“What are the four counties you’re going to do this to?” he asked and then answered his own question: “Fulton, Cobb, Gwinnett and DeKalb.” The four counties have large minority populations and voted overwhelmingly for President Joe Biden in the 2020 election.

John Andrews, chair of the Democratic Party of Union County, in introducing Cobb said changes to the State Election Board worried him. “It gives power to the legislature, the people whom we pay, but they don’t listen to us,” he said. “We need to learn how to work within [SB] 202 to turn people out [to vote].”

Two provisions of SB 202 that Cobb said are unlikely to survive court challenges are the change to the federal election runoff schedule and the voter fraud hotline to the attorney general. Changing the schedule for federal runoffs from nine weeks after the election to 28 days will prove unconstitutional, he said. This is because it does not provide enough time to send and allow return of absentee ballots to military overseas voters and, therefore, creates two classes of voters who are treated differently.

He also does not expect the hotline to be implemented because the Attorney General’s office does not have the manpower to screen every complaint. The State Board of Elections already has a hotline and most of the calls it receives are dismissed with only a few being substantive enough to be forwarded to the Attorney General for further investigation.