Georgia ballot rules mean voters are falling between cracks, advocates say
Just six days before the midterm election, Madison Cook, an eager first-time Georgia voter and a college student at school in Mississippi, awaited the arrival of her requested absentee ballot. She continued to follow up with her county election officials. But nearly one month after her application was processed, it appeared to be lost in the mail.
“Here’s a great example of a voter who is falling through the cracks,” said Vasu Abhiraman, deputy policy and advocacy director at ACLU of Georgia, who received an email seeking help for Cook. “If she doesn’t get her ballot, she has almost no hope of voting.”
Here in Georgia, early in-person voting was projected to reach 2.4m by the end of Friday – the last day of early voting – marking the highest voter turnout of a midterm election in the state’s history. But voting rights organizers say that this year’s high in-person voter turnout is reflective of the impact Georgia’s new restrictive voting law has had on other forms of voting, such as casting an absentee ballot by mail or on election day.
In this year’s midterm elections, about 200,000 of the nearly 300,000 requested absentee ballots had been returned as of Friday. That’s proportionally far less than the 2020 presidential election, when voters cast more than 1.3m absentee ballots throughout the state.
“The hurdles are up in front of Georgia
voters, and some are having difficulty jumping those hurdles on the way to the ballot box,” said Abhiraman. “Voters in Georgia are not feeling as confident when they cast their ballots this time around.”
Advocates say the restrictions disproportionately affect specific demographics throughout the state who continue to grow within Georgia’s rapidly changing electorate. Asian voters make up less than 2%, or about 35,000, of early votes in the state’s midterm elections this year – a noticeable downward turn from the 134,000 ballots cast by the same community at this point in 2020.
“Asian Americans in Georgia make up 3.8% of Georgia’s electorate,” said Abhiraman. “If you go back to 2020, the AAPI community was more likely than any other group to vote absentee by mail. So, it’s these nuances in data that show voters who relied on certain methods of voting are finding it difficult to cast their ballots.”
Groups such as Asian Americans Advancing Justice Atlanta (AAJA) point to the language barriers Asian and other immigrant communities can experience during the election process. The organization, which works to aid voters through tools such as translations of voting documents, filed a lawsuit alleging that changes shortening absentee request deadlines make it more challenging to ensure equitable access to the ballot.
Georgia’s electorate is proven to be highly engaged, thanks in part to voting rights organizers. AAJA-Atlanta is a part of the grassroots, multi-issue, voting rights coalition growing throughout the state that has worked to educate voters on a comprehensive scale.
“We are lockstep across all of these groups saying vote early in-person,” said Abhiraman. “You have three processes available to you, but [the Georgia] legislature attacked absentee by mail, and the legislature made it much harder to vote on election day given that you can’t cast a provisional ballot outside of the one location that is assigned to you.”
State Republicans, who are also celebrating high voter turnout in Georgia, are comparing this election to 2018, the state’s last midterm election. However, Abhiraman said that we should be examining voter turnout as it compares with 2020 as the ballot more closely aligns with the general election.
The 2018 midterm elections featured the state’s gubernatorial election, and several US House races. However, this year’s midterm elections feature the highly visible gubernatorial rematch between Stacey Abrams and the current governor, Brian Kemp, and US Senate race between Senator Raphael Warnock and the Republican Herschel Walker. The state’s Senate race is one of the major elections determining which party will hold political power in the nation’s capital in the coming year.
“Voters in Georgia are cognizant of the fact that their vote really matters on a national stage. They are taking the information they get and jumping over hurdles in record numbers,” says Abhiraman. “But, while we are seeing high turnout, we are still losing people in the cracks because it’s easy to forget these folks exist when we’re seeing millions of people turn out.”