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If the Saturday after Christmas wasn’t sacrosanct to GOP officials, while all of a sudden is the Saturday after Thanksgiving?
“It’s not our choice. It’s literally in black-letter law that the Saturday following a state holiday cannot be used for early voting,” said Sterling. “We all thought there was going to be Saturday voting until we looked at the law really closely.” It’s the same law as in 2020-21.
It’s cherry-picking, the Democrats say, because the provisions they are citing to block the vote don’t apply to runoffs. In writing the statute, the Georgia legislature “expressly distinguished between three different categories of elections”, they point out: a primary election; a general election; and a runoff. And the ban on early Saturday voting after a holiday “applies only to primary and general elections, not runoffs.”
If Raffensperger is going to conflate runoffs with primary and general elections, they say, then he should be instructing the counties to have voting available on November 19, because state law requires that the polls have to be open on the second and third Saturdays before primary and general elections. If runoffs are supposed to be treated just the same as other elections, then there should be that extra day as well.
“That is not how the statute operates: if the sentence’s prohibition on holding advance voting on a Saturday after a holiday applies to runoffs, so too must its command that advance voting be held on the second and third Saturday in the first place,” they write. “To read the statute otherwise is nonsensical.”
Yes, it’s nonsensical. It’s also cheating. Republicans—and particularly Georgia Republicans—will do anything to keep Democrats down. Their new law slashed ballot box access for absentee ballots. They cut the time for runoff voting in half after Democrats Jon Ossoff and Warnock won in 2020-21, and now they’re twisting the law to cut out key early voting days.
The only answer is to fight in the courts and on the ground, by making sure that the Warnock campaign has the money and the volunteers to get out his vote. The DSCC and party are making sure the court battle is covered. We can help with the rest.
There are plenty of opportunities to help get out the vote in Georgia, and we’ve made it easy for you to find them. Just go here, scroll down to learn more, and sign up!
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