The Republican lieutenant governor of Georgia said his party’s questioning of the 2020 election results hurts their “credibility” when it comes to the latest push for reform.
In the aftermath of the collective skepticism from the Right regarding President Biden’s November victory and the dozens of unsuccessful lawsuits that followed, conservatives in both state and federal legislative bodies have pushed for stronger election security, claiming that it’s the only way to restore public confidence in the results, while Democrats have accused them of pushing for tighter laws to restrict voters from going to the polls.
Georgia is a hotbed in the election reform debate after experiencing two Democratic Senate runoff victories in January, giving left the majority, and has introduced more than 80 election reform bills in the general assembly, according to Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan.
Duncan told MSNBC’s Chuck Todd on Sunday that his party’s actions in both questioning the results of the election and the subsequent deadly Capitol attack on Jan. 6 hurt the party’s reputation on the issue of election security.
HOTLY CONTESTED VOTING RESTRICTION BILL HEADS TO STATE SENATE
“This started shortly after the November elections when all of the misinformation started flying up,” he said. “And quite honestly, it hurt Republicans. In any sort of conversation around election reform, we lost credibility. Those were ten weeks we can’t take back. January 6th was a pivot point for this country and for this party. And look, we’ve got four years to win back the White House. We’re not going to do it with a divisive tone.”
The Georgia Legislature is currently considering various bills that, if passed, would require voter ID, block voters from being automatically registered to vote when obtaining their driver’s licenses, end no-excuse absentee voting, give poll watchers more access to vote tallying, set a deadline to request an absentee ballot to 11 days before Election Day, and restrict drop boxes and early voting on Sundays, among other provisions.
Stacey Abrams, who lost the 2018 gubernatorial race to Gov. Brian Kemp and has continued to lead Democratic grassroots organizing in the Peach State, is leading an effort to push back on the intended voting restrictions calling the bills “racist” in a Sunday morning interview on CNN.
“Well, first of all, I do absolutely agree that it’s racist. It is a redux of Jim Crow in a suit and tie,” Abrams said. “We know that the only thing that precipitated these changes, it’s not that there was the question of security.”
Forty-three states have carried over, prefiled, or introduced a total of 253 bills that would restrict voting access, as of late February, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, a liberal-leaning law and policy institute.
At the federal level, the U.S. House of Representatives passed its own election reform bill, H.R. 1, the “For the People Act,” earlier this month. The bill would require states to use automatic voter registration for federal elections and allow same-day voter registration, among other measures, but will face an uphill battle in the evenly divided Senate.
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Democrats argue that the bill, in conjunction with H.R 4, The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, is necessary to make sure everyone has easy access to the voting booths, while conservatives argue the Democrats’ push amounts to a federalist takeover of state-run elections in an effort to keep themselves in power.
