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GEORGIA, CENTER OF ELECTION DISPUTES  
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Carl Smith
May 28, 2024
Governing
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_ Election skeptics haven’t taken their eyes off Georgia since the
last presidential election. Officials there are working to make sure
2024 outcomes are as bulletproof as its 2020 results have proved to
be. _

Early voting in Atlanta. Georgia currently offers voters about 21
days of early voting, but some in the state Legislature are hoping to
shorten this period. , John Spink/TNS

 

In Brief:

* Political campaigns at all levels include messages that cast doubt
on election integrity.
* No state has faced more challenges to its processes than Georgia,
even though its system is considered a model for other states.
* At a recent briefing, Georgia election officials discussed what
they are doing to be ready for the general election.

Georgia officials pulled off the biggest election in the state’s
history in 2020, in the middle of a pandemic. Because the state was
critical to the outcome of both the presidential election and control
of the Senate, instead of being celebrated their work was challenged
by dozens of lawsuits
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various forms of election fraud.

Three audits, including a hand count of millions of paper ballots,
failed to uncover evidence of misconduct, but today Georgia remains a
flashpoint as the 2024 election cycle ramps up. Former President
Donald Trump and a number of his associates are fighting criminal
charges
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related to election interference in the state. This year, the first
presidential debate will take place in Atlanta.

Against this backdrop, a panel of state and local officials met in
Atlanta at an event
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organized by the Carter Center and Rice University's Baker Institute
for Public Policy to discuss what they’re doing to be ready for
November.

The panel was moderated by attorney David Becker, founder of the
nonprofit Center for Election Innovation and Research. Earlier in his
career, Becker served as lead counsel for voting rights litigation for
the Department of Justice. He opened the discussion by describing the
2020 election as “the most secure, transparent and verified election
in Georgia's history — and in American history.”

This wasn't enough to calm the waters, however. In 2021, Republican
legislators secured the passage of a controversial "election integrity
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it shortened the period during which absentee ballots could be
requested, restricted the number of ballot dropboxes and changed ID
requirements. It removed the secretary of state from the state
election board and required that the board chair be selected by the
General Assembly.

Last Saturday, the Georgia Republican Party selected
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a leading fundraiser for the “Stop the Steal” movement to
represent it on the Republican National Committee. Nine
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Georgia in Congress are considered to be election deniers. A
borderless conspiracy machine is already setting the stage for
rejecting 2024 results that partisans don’t like.

Other states see Georgia’s election system as a model of good
practice. The conservative Heritage Foundation rated it second
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among all states in election integrity, but the people who run its
elections aren’t taking anything for granted.

Who Gets to Vote?

A common strategy for casting doubt on election results has been to
sow suspicion that large numbers of people voted who had no right to
do so — they weren’t citizens, voted more than once, or were dead,
among other scenarios. One of the boldest claims about 2020 was that
66,000 people who voted were underage. When political scientists
examined the method used to come up with that count and did their own
calculation, they found
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the average age of the “underage” population at the time of the
election was in fact 42.

Georgia is among the states that automatically registers voters when
they obtain a driver’s license. Residents must meet Real ID
requirements to obtain or renew a driver’s license, which include
documents giving proof of both residency and citizenship. This data is
sent to county registrars by the Department of Driver Services in an
electronic format that bypasses problems with handwriting legibility.
Applications for voter registration are reviewed against these DDS
lists.

Georgia is one of the 25 states that are members of the Electronic
Registration Information System (ERIC), a tool created by election
officials to enable secure sharing of their voter lists to keep track
of voters who move or die, and to prevent registration in more than
one state. Panelist Blake Evans, elections director for the Georgia
Secretary of State’s Office, is chair of ERIC’s board of
directors.

ERIC makes it easy to compare Georgia’s voter rolls to those of the
other members, Evans said. ERIC had been a bipartisan success story
until it came under suspicion from those searching for possible causes
of illegal votes. Several states
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have left it over the past year. Panelists noted the irony that
attacks on a system designed to eliminate registration mistakes were
coming from the same groups questioning the integrity of voter rolls.

It takes “extreme effort and extreme staff time” to compare lists
with states that are not members of ERIC, Evans said. “We’re
committed to doing it, because that’s what it takes to have clean
voter rolls.”

Shauna Dozier, elections director for Clayton County, said her staff
clean voter rolls on both daily and monthly bases, including scrolling
obituaries. “We need the data for practical reasons,” Dozier said.
The count of registered voters determines how many voting machines and
polling places and how much paper will be needed.

Casting and Counting

An important component of election accuracy is that every voter who is
eligible to vote has an opportunity to do so. Georgia offers about 21
days of early voting, including Saturday options. There’s also
Sunday voting in Clayton County, Dozier says.

Absentee mail voting — or vote-from-home as its proponents now call
it — is another option. The number of people voting that way soared
in 2020 because of the pandemic, said Sara Tindall Ghazal of the
Georgia State Election Board. In 2022, this went back to pre-pandemic
levels of 5 to 7 percent. In-person voting is split about 50-50
between early voting and same-day voting.

Edward Lindsey, a former member of the Georgia House and the state
election board, noted that some people are demanding changes that
could eliminate some of these options.

“They're pushing very hard on our policymakers in the General
Assembly to curtail this,” he said. “They very much want to see us
go back, curtail early voting dramatically — a lot of them even want
to go as far as to say that you should only be voting on Election
Day.”

Aside from the impact on access, confining voting to a single day can
bring considerable risk, Becker said. Absentee and early voting
options are insurance against the disruption that election-day power
outages, cyber events or even bad weather could cause.

Georgia replaced paperless voting machines and implemented an
auditable paper ballot system in 2020, enabling a hand count that was
consequential in ending disputes over results.

Lindsey recalled controversy around the 2018 election, in which a
discrepancy between the number of votes for lieutenant governor and
the number of votes for other statewide offices led to legal
challenges. If paper ballots had been available, those could have been
resolved more quickly by physical evidence that many voters simply
chose to skip this office.

Are We All Right?

A recent Reuters/Ipsos poll
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found that 2 of 3 Americans are worried about the potential for
violence from extremists if the November election doesn’t go their
way. This didn’t happen during the midterms, but as in 2020 the
presidential race is being front-loaded as suspect.

In Georgia, the Secretary of State’s Office has partnered with the
Emergency Management Agency on tabletop exercises focused on physical
security, Evans said, including law enforcement as well as election
staff. Required training at the 2024 conference of the Georgia
Association of Voter Registration and Election Officials touched on
active shooters, conflict resolution, de-escalation and the use of
Narcan in the event of opioid overdoses, Dozier said.

It's time to demand an end to rhetoric regarding election fraud from
candidates up and down the line, said Lindsey, which is creating a
need for training that wasn’t necessary a decade ago. Given the
likelihood that this may not only continue but escalate, Ghazal
emphasized the need for election officials to be proactive in
explaining election processes and “prebunk” narratives that they
know are coming.

In closing the discussion, Becker noted that he’s constantly being
asked one question about the 2024 election: “Are we going to be all
right?”

The answer is “yes,” he said. “It’s going to be the best-run
election we’ve ever held in the United States, and certainly here in
Georgia, thanks to all of you.”

Carl Smith is a senior staff writer for _Governing_ and covers a broad
range of issues affecting states and localities. He can be reached at
[email protected] or on Twitter at @governingwriter.
 

* election deniers
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* Georgia
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