Georgia Republicans celebrated the start of the legislative session on Monday with several attempts to chip away at the state's absentee voting process, and Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp’s response was disappointing as ever. While Kemp said he was “reserving judgment” on specific proposals to make absentee ballots less accessible, he was all too willing to back an added photo ID requirement to vote by mail, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported. “It’s a simple way to make sure that type of voting is further secured, and it’s a good first place to start,” Kemp said: “It’s completely reasonable in this day and time, and in light of what’s going on, it would give all voters peace of mind and wouldn’t be restrictive.”
Translation: Rather than believe Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s repeated assurances that there was no widespread voter fraud in the state, Kemp’s priority is appeasing terrorists who would sooner overthrow their own government than accept the fact that President Donald Trump legitimately lost an election.
“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. There is no evidence or reason to believe our signature match system is insecure,” state Rep. Josh McLaurin told the AJC. He plans to introduce legislation to allow those convicted of felonies to vote before they've completed their sentences. “Being convicted of a crime doesn’t make you less of a citizen,” he said in a tweet Monday. “Let’s end felony disenfranchisement.”
Meanwhile, Republicans have put forth legislation to end "no excuse" absentee voting, ban mailers with unrequested absentee ballot applications, and banish drop boxes, according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “When you don’t have a secure chain of custody, particularly with drop boxes, there’s no reason for that to be in the process,” GOP Georgia Sen. Burt Jones told the newspaper. “You’ve got three weeks of early voting and Saturday voting. You’ve given ample time and opportunities for people to get the effort to go in to vote.”
He and state Sen. Brandon Beach lost their Senate appointments to lead committees as chairmen after they “aggressively pushed to overturn Georgia’s election results,” AJC reporter Greg Bluestein tweeted Tuesday. “[Others who also aggressively promoted Trump’s falsehoods have kept theirs,]” he added.
Jones, Beach, and three other Republican Georgia senators signed a letter to Vice President Mike Pence pressuring him to push back congressional certification of electoral votes “to allow for further investigation of fraud, irregularities, and misconduct” in the state’s election, the AJC reported.
In the witch hunt of sore losers calculating their own political futures, the senators wrote: “We have identified a team of experts who are able to examine the ballots and the voting and counting equipment to determine whether or not the integrity of the vote was violated.”
Beach, Jones, Matt Brass, Greg Dolezal, and William Ligon signed the letter. Jones told the AJC he still has the original copy, which was never delivered to Pence because “we saw the writing on the wall.” Yet the push to suppress the vote in Georgia based on Trump’s unfounded claims of voter fraud lives on.
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