It’s become something of an annual tradition for states with Republican-controlled legislatures to try and change election laws in their states. The floodgates opened in Georgia after the U.S. Supreme Court in 2013 dismantled a key provision of the federal Voting Rights Act, said Anne Gray Herring, a policy analyst for Common Cause Georgia, a government watchdog nonprofit.
“The staggering number of election bills have definitely ramped up, even more so since 2020,” she said, referring to former President Donald Trump’s efforts to cast doubt on Georgia’s voting systems after losing the 2020 presidential election.
With the 2024 presidential election looming, many observers are paying close attention to several bills introduced by Republican lawmakers for Georgia’s current legislative session that kicked off Jan. 8.
Vice President Kamala Harris called the Peach State “ground zero” for voting rights during a visit to Atlanta last week. “We have seen in the state of Georgia, for example, anti-voter laws, laws that have limited [ballot] drop boxes and made it illegal to even provide food and water to people standing in line [to vote] for hours,” she said.
Targeting Raffensperger
Republican state senators just introduced Senate Bill 358 on Jan. 12, which targets Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, also a Republican. He’d refused to entertain Trump’s post-election plea to “find” more Georgia votes after he lost the state to President Joe Biden. SB 358 would remove the secretary of state from the State Election Board and authorize the board to investigate the office.
“We’re going to look at making our State Board of Elections more autonomous by separating them [sic] from the Secretary of State’s office. This will allow them to adjudicate election complaints more efficiently, independently, and impartially,” House Speaker Jon Burns, said at the Georgia Chamber of Commerce’s annual Eggs & Issues breakfast at the start of the legislative session on Jan. 10. Burns is among the Republican contingent sponsoring SB 358.
Raffensperger has been a frequent target for a vocal group of Republicans who are sympathetic to Trump’s false claim that he won Georgia in the 2020 presidential election.
Georgia Republicans’ sweeping 2021 voting law overhaul included removing Raffensperger as a voting member of the State Election Board. ( The secretary of state remains a non-voting board member.) SB 358 comes on the heels of a failed State Election Board vote in December on whether to investigate Raffensperger over the 2020 election. The vote deadlocked at 2-2, but a majority vote is required for an investigation.
The end of QR codes on ballots?
Expect Georgia Republicans to push legislation to remove QR codes from Georgia ballots. For the Dominion Voting Systems touchscreen machines used in Georgia since 2020, voters mark their choices on an electronic touchscreen and then print out a paper copy of their ballot, which has a QR code. A scanner reads the QR code to tally the official votes.
House Speaker Jon Burns said Republican lawmakers aim to “strengthen the security of our ballots by moving away from the QR code on balance, which many voters find confusing, and towards visible watermarks on security paper to denote voter selections.”
According to the Secretary of State’s office, removing QR codes means that the state would need to purchase 32,500 new ballot printers, at a cost of $15 million. The legislature can consider election security proposals and funding in the current session
Meanwhile, a federal trial over the current system for recording paper ballots just started last week. A Democratic-leaning group of voters and the Coalition for Good Governance initially sued the secretary of state and the State Election Board in 2017, alleging the Dominion machines can be hacked or manipulated. Instead, the plaintiffs want the state to prohibit the use of touchscreen machines in favor of hand-marked paper ballots.
Bryan Tyson, an attorney for Raffensperger, defended the Dominion machines during opening statements on Jan. 9. “There is no evidence of a single vote being altered in Georgia because of malware,” he said, according to CBS News.
SB 221 returns with a new focus
Some bills that didn’t pass last year are still viable, since the 2024 session is the second year of a two-year legislative term. Lawmakers can bring them back from limbo before Crossover Day on Feb. 29, when bills that pass one chamber “cross over” to the other.
Voting rights advocates are wary of Senate Bill 221, an omnibus election bill that Republican state senators have revived from 2023. Last year’s version of the bill was far more broad, with provisions omitted from the 2024 version, such as expanding the opportunity for mass challenges of voter eligibility.
“It contained a lot of anti-voter provisions,” said Nicole Robinson, political director of Fair Fight Action, a voting rights organization founded by former Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams. “We’re hearing that some of the things in that bill might come back ([in 2024])—whether it’s through that bill or a new one.”
The current bill mandates audits following all state-wide primaries or elections and changes the deadline for required election night reporting from 10 p.m. to midnight. It also revises some of the language used on absentee ballot applications, and calls for penalties for “the willful neglect or refusal of a county or municipal election superintendent to call an election where required to do so by a local Act of the General Assembly.”
HB 426: Lifting the seal on ballots
Another bill that could make a return from the 2023 session is House Bill 426, about the retention and preservation of ballots. The 2023 version sought to eliminate the current requirement that county superior courts preserve consolidated election returns and individual ballots for the county under seal, which means they can’t be accessed by the general public.
Currently, individuals must file a lawsuit to obtain physical copies of election documentation. However, last year HB 426 proposed a shift where public access to ballots would only necessitate a simple request. The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Shaw Blackmon, R-Bonaire,argued last year that the changes would enhance transparency and ensure a genuinely “citizen-run election.”
However, opponents say lifting the seal on election documentation could lead to voter disenfranchisement and place more burdens on election officials.
“What we’ve seen is a lot of conspiracy theorists don’t believe in the election results and believe there’s fraud,” said Robinson. “So they want access to all of these documents themselves. What [HB 426] does is just make it easier for them to gain access to election-related documents.”
More to come?
The 2024 session is only a week old. There is still plenty of time for legislators to revive bills from the previous session, says Herring, the policy analyst for Common Cause Georgia. “The way it works is there are bills from previous sessions that are still technically live bills—they can be reassigned to committee or they will submit a new version of a bill and cherry pick provisions from previous bills and put it into something original.”
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