Absentee ballot request forms face new rules in House bill changes
♦ Dempsey testifies she got absentee ballot request forms at two locations.
Georgia House lawmakers moved legislation Wednesday that would prohibit the Secretary of State and local elections officials from sending out absentee ballot request forms unless a voter asks for one.
The House Governmental Affairs Committee tacked the proposal onto a measure, Senate Bill 463, that aims to curb wait times at polling places by splitting up large precincts into smaller ones and establishing less restrictive rules for signatures to match what is shown on a voter’s ID card.
The bill was also amended Wednesday to allow poll workers to work in precincts outside the county in which they live and to raise the age for moving elderly voters to the front of the line at polling places from 70 to 75 years old.
State lawmakers have been mulling ways to avoid a repeat of the June 9 primary that drew long lines in several counties and overwhelmed elections workers struggling to process tens of thousands of absentee ballots in some counties.
An amendment to Senate Bill 463 brought in the House committee would prevent elections officials from sending out “unsolicited absentee ballot applications.”
Rep. Katie Dempsey, Rrome,
said Wednesday she had not seen the amendment but she testified before the committee late Tuesday concerning absentee ballot requests.
Dempsey said she and her husband had received four absentee ballot requests in two locations. Three had come to their residence and another to her UPS box. She’d also been given a ballot that included the presidential primary, which she’d already voted in earlier.
She’d brought this up to local elections officials and said it caused her concern. Another concern was elections officials inability to answer why. Admittedly, she said, this has been a unprecedented election and some issues have to be expected.
State law allows any registered voter to request an absentee ballot via an application that can be returned by mail or in person to their county registrar’s office. It is silent on whether elections officials can send out those applications on their own initiative.
As concerns mounted over coronavirus in March, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger took steps to proactively send absentee request forms to all of Georgia’s nearly 7 million registered voters ahead of the primary. That led to more than 1 million votes cast by mail in the primary, smashing previous state records on absentee voting.
The amendment brought Wednesday would eliminate chances of a repeat scenario in which every Georgian receives an absentee application from the state, though Raffensperger had already said he does not plan to issue those forms again for the Aug. 11 primary runoffs.
Republican lawmakers, who control both chambers in the General Assembly, framed the proposal as needed to curb problems seen in processing huge numbers of absentee ballot request forms during the June 9 primary.
“It is in no way an attempt to remove the ability to vote or request in any manner,” said Rep. Shaw Blackmon, R-bonaire, who chairs the committee. “It is just a capacity issue.”
But Democratic lawmakers argued the ban would strip the ability of local elections officials to send out mail-in request forms on their own if they wished to do so, particularly as a tool to reduce in-person voting as fears continue over coronavirus.
“This ties the hands of local governments if they want to do that,” said Rep. Renitta Shannon, D-decatur. “And all we’ve heard in the last couple days is the counties need to get it together.”
Lawmakers on the committee also approved changes to the bill that call for the Secretary of State’s office to set up an online portal for voters to request absentee ballots. Editor John Bailey contributed to this report.