Voting rights activists said the 2021 law made it harder to cast a ballot in myriad ways: It limited the number and location of ballot drop boxes, instituted new ID requirements to vote by mail and shortened the window for a runoff from the nine weeks in the 2020 election to four weeks, contributing to long lines during the early voting period.
Additionally, the voter registration deadline fell on November 7 – the day before the general election and before Georgians knew for certain that the contest would advance to a runoff because neither Warnock nor his Republican challenger Herschel Walker had surpassed the 50% threshold to win outright in the general election.
In the 2020 election cycle, at least 23,000 people who registered after Election Day went on to vote in the Senate runoff in January 2021, according to an analysis of Georgia’s secretary of state data by Catalist, a company that provides data, analytics and other services to Democrats, academics and nonprofit issue-advocacy organizations.
And only an 11th-hour court victory for Warnock and Democrats paved the way for counties to hold early in-person voting on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. State election officials had opposed casting ballots on that date, saying Georgia law prohibited voting on a Saturday if there is a state holiday on the Thursday or Friday before.
“It’s death by a thousand cuts,” Kendra Cotton, CEO of the voting rights group New Georgia Project Action Fund, said of the new restrictions. “They are not trying to hit the jugular, so you bleed out at once. It’s these little nicks, so you slowly become anemic before you pass out.”
“It’s a margins game,” she added. “I wish folks would stop acting like the purpose of SB202 was to disenfranchise the masses. Joe Biden won this state by a little less than 12,000 votes. I can guarantee you that there are more than 12,000 people across this state who were eligible to vote in this election and they could not.”
Even Cotton’s 21-year-old daughter, Jarah Cotton, became ensnared.
The younger Cotton, a Harvard University senior, said she had planned to vote absentee in November’s general election – but misunderstood a new requirement of Georgia’s law: that she print out her online application for absentee ballot, sign it “with a pen and ink” and then upload it.
In the runoff, Jarah Cotton said she successfully completed her application for an absentee ballot but did not receive it before she returned home to Powder Springs, Georgia, for the Thanksgiving holiday.
The court ruling permitting voting the Saturday after Thanksgiving allowed her to cast an in-person ballot in the runoff – but only after her family paid $180 to delay her return flight to Boston by a day.
“I don’t think it should be this hard,” Jarah Cotton said of her experience. “It should be more straightforward, but I think that’s reflective of the voting process in Georgia.”