Voting Rights Acts and Actors

President Biden is visiting Georgia this week to campaign for voting rights; the threat is real, but not as great as some imagine.

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger is one of the heroes of the 2020 presidential election in America. It was he who resisted former president Donald Trump’s plea to “find” thousands of votes in order to upend Joe Biden’s victory in the state. For that principled stand, Raffensperger has earned the ire of many fellow Republicans in his home state for not “stopping the steal.”

Raffensperger was interviewed on CBS Television’s “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan” Sunday morning and was on the defensive once again. Georgia has a new election law, castigated by Democrats across the country as an act of “voter suppression,” meaning it’s allegedly targeting Blacks, and it fell to Raffensperger to both explain the law and defend it.

The background to the interview was President Joe Biden’s scheduled visit to Georgia this week to campaign for new federal legislation that proponents say will strengthen voting rights for all Americans. I’ve written about voter suppression and election integrity before and it’s time to do so again.

According to a recent White House statement, “President Biden and Vice President Harris will travel to Atlanta, Georgia, to speak to the American people about the urgent need to pass legislation to protect the constitutional right to vote and the integrity of our elections from corrupt attempts to strip law-abiding citizens of their fundamental freedoms and allow partisan state officials to undermine vote counting processes."

Separately, another White House spokesman called Georgia “the belly of the beast” for voter suppression, and President Biden himself has called laws such as the new one in Georgia “Jim Crow 2.0.”

Raffensperger could be excused for running for cover from this onslaught from both the Left and the Right, but he did no such thing. He defended certain controversial aspects of the Georgia law (SB 202), including requiring some form of identification for mail-in voting, as well as limitations on ballot “drop boxes.”

I’ll summarize some of the main points SB 202, and you can read up in more detail here: Some form of voter ID will be required for mail-in ballots, no longer signatures which were always hard to decipher, but instead a photo of a state-issued ID will be accepted, but if that’s not available, then a copy of a birth certificate or even a utility bill with voter’s name and address on it will suffice. Also, citizens who want to vote by mail must request a ballot (they will not automatically be mailed to households, as is the case in some states), and they can do so 78 days in advance of an election, which is down from 180 days in some Georgia counties previously.

Ballot “drop boxes,” which were new to Georgia in 2020 because of emergency voting rules due to the Covid-19 pandemic that year, are now required: not less than one in each county but not more than one per 100,000 voters (so, that’s seen as a limitation). Additionally, the drop boxes can only be placed at voting locations and will only be available during voting hours. This is seen as less convenient for citizens who might have a harder time going to an actual polling place, hence critics say it’s part of voter suppression.

Also, “ballot harvesting,” the practice of third parties collecting ballots from eligible voters, perhaps in a congregate housing situation or simply by going door-to-door, is effectively banned. Georgia allows close relatives or roommates to deliver mail-in ballots to election officials, and allows third party organizations to provide mail-in ballot requests to eligible voters - they just cannot deliver completed ballots to election officials.

The legislation is nearly 100 pages long so the highlights above are of course incomplete.

Objections to the new law include the belief that some eligible voters cannot “prove” who they are, either because they were born at home decades ago and have no birth certificate (most likely the case with very elderly rural Blacks), or they have no property or utility bills in their names (perhaps they live with adult children). In general, advocacy groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union have long opposed various voter ID requirement across the country, and in June of last year the US Department of Justice filed suit against the State of Georgia claiming that SB 202 is racially discriminatory under Section 2 of the (current) Voting Rights Act.  Yet almost all developed countries in the world require voter ID. For example, 46 out of 47 European countries require photo ID, according to one study.

(An addendum to the above, point added Jan. 10 - some atlases only count 44 countries as part of Europe, and types of acceptable photos and/or ease in obtaining an official ID varies and/or just when they have to be presented varies in some of these countries. Critics of the Georgia law and other state ID requirements argue that we make it “harder" for eligible voters to obtain a suitable ID than in some other democracies.)

It's been argued by critics of the new Georgia law, as well as somewhat similar laws across the country, that they have only been passed in Republican-dominated state legislatures. That appears to be true, but proving a motive for a crime is not the same as proving a crime has been committed. It’s like the difference between a probable cause affidavit in a criminal proceeding and an actual conviction after trial.

Defenders of Georgia’s law, and similar ones, invoke the term “election integrity” as a kind of counter to the notion of “voter suppression.” I don’t like false dichotomies or binary thinking (i.e., it’s rarely accurate to say one side is entirely right and the other side is entirely wrong in a dispute, or vice versa) and I really don’t like sloganeering and tar-and-feather tactics in what’s supposed to be a democratic polity. In the case of the Georgia law, the truth lies somewhere in the middle.

Now, here’s what I heard Brad Raffensperger say on television Sunday morning: It’s all about the secret ballot and chain of custody. For example, as I’ve written once before, I’ve been a Democratic election judge and election clerk several times in my home state of Indiana and no one is allowed into a “booth” with a voter except in rare cases (only when assistance is needed and requested, and then members of both parties are bound to assist). This is to maintain secrecy of the ballot. No one (in Indiana, at least) is allowed to lobby a voter who’s in line to vote or to pass along cheat sheets – this is arguably what’s behind SB 202’s seemingly odd prohibition against allowing people to hand bottled water to voters in line waiting to vote (i.e., the issue is not water, but what else might be passed along, though critics say the law creates a disincentive to waiting in long lines).

Critics of the Georgia law may denigrate the notion of “election integrity” but I don’t know how anyone can attack Brad Raffensperger’s integrity. After all, he was tested under fire and he passed the test. Other people may be blowing smoke, but not he.

There certainly is one alarming aspect of SB 202, however, and that is the provision granting the State Election Board new power to replace a duly elected county election board for poor performance, which might just be a pretext. Also, the state legislature now has the power to appoint the Chair of the State Election Board (in addition to allowing the House and the Senate to appoint one member each), which would seem to put partisan politics front and center in the state board. From what I’m reading that does not mean the State Election Board can overturn an election, but it does suggest county election boards might feel the political pressure anyway, i.e., there may be a chilling effect on their otherwise, hoped-for impartial performance. I do see this one provision as an opening for a one-sided state legislature to unduly influence election results and that is a threat to election integrity. And next time we may not have a Brad Raffensperger to ensure the election integrity we should all want.