The Georgia senate runoff with Democratic candidates Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock hoping to unseat Republican incumbents and corrupt COVID-19 profiteers David Perdue and Amy Loeffler is only weeks away. While the Democratic Party is working to create a transition team that will be able to hopefully hit the ground running in January, the Republican Party continues to hedge their bet that they can undermine our democracy just enough to either win both Senate seats, or Donald Trump can steal the election and they can officially come forward as the oligarchy they have been for decades.
However, the problem Republicans face in Georgia right now is that even though the runoff system was created as a racist failsafe against democratic power, this year has all the earmarks of being different. As with all runoffs, there’s a high probability that there will be fewer voters than there were on the national Election Day. But while this has historically helped conservatives in the state, this year the get-out-the-vote infrastructure built out by progressive groups and people like Stacey Abrams over the past couple of years may help change that. The Republican Party is not a creative group of people, so they’re once again attempting to figure out ways to suppress the votes of people of color in the coming weeks.
The Georgia runoff is Jan. 5. Click here to request an absentee ballot. Early in-person voting starts Dec. 14. And REGISTER TO VOTE here by Dec. 7.
Joe Biden won Georgia, and now we can win back the Senate with the two runoff elections on Jan. 5. Click here to find out what volunteer opportunities you can do from afar to help us win Georgia.
On Monday, Georgia's State Election Board was considering three emergency rules for this upcoming runoff. Of the three rules being considered, two were passed, according to Georgia’s NPR affiliate. One of the rules was an extension of monitoring drop boxes in different counties for absentee ballots, adding video recording as a part of the security process. The second rule shortened when counties can begin processing absentee ballots, from two weeks to one week and a day before the election. However, the second rule also changed the scanning of absentee ballots from counties’ discretion to requiring them to begin scanning those ballots into their counting system before election day. Most importantly, the third rule that the state’s election board was reviewing was not passed.
A third rule dealing with residency concerns for new voter registrations was scrapped from the discussion, with the secretary of state's office instead opting to issue that information to counties as an official election bulletin.
As WJCL reported earlier in the day, this third proposed rule would have allowed more and more absentee ballots to be marked as “challenged” by forcing registrars to become detectives and chase around people who may have not had a driver’s license, or if they did have a driver’s license, not have proof of vehicle registered in the state. And if they did have that driver’s license and that vehicle registration, they may not have proof that they paid a required tax on the vehicle. The excuse for this rule is the evidence-devoid conspiracy theory that thousands of people are temporarily moving into Georgia just to vote.
Racism and anti-Democratic legislation and rules seem to be the only things that can be pointed to as consistent polices of the Republican Party at this point in history. Sure, there’s the deregulation and tax break thing, but at this point, those things—once fantabulously connected to fiscal conservatism—have now just become symptoms of avarice and corruption.