United States – Georgia’s automatic voter registration has almost all eligible citizens registered as voters, but now some Republicans want to switch that system off.
On Thursday, the Ethics Committee of the Senate voted to accelerate Senate Bill 221, which would make it mandatory for people to opt-in when to apply for it or renew a driver’s license to have automatic voter registration. At present, they’re opted in unless they opt-out, as reported by Associated Press.
Critics Warn of Voter Challenges
The bill, in this way, makes it easier for voters to be challenged based on where they live, which may clear the path for Republican activists who believe the state registers are full of fraudulent voters to get rid of thousands of voters.
This plan is in the works as Georgia is anticipated to be a swing state in this year’s presidential election, and the GOP grassroots supporters have been endorsing Trump’s unsubstantiated charges that he lost the 2020 elections due to fraud.
Voter’s difference
A 2023 study conducted by the Center for Election Innovation and Research revealed that 98 percent of active registered voters accounted for the voting-eligible population, while in 2016, it was just 78% when the state began registering people at driver’s license offices unless they specifically refused. However, the share dropped to 92% in 2022, which the government described as a typical phenomenon of a non-election year.
Republicans contend that when someone registers again, and their information is not matched with a prior record, the system generates duplicate registrations and adds undue workload for election officials, as reported by Associated Press.
“The intent is certainly not to reduce voter registration; the intent is to clarify and make voter registration more accurate,” said Senate Ethics Committee Chairman Max Burns, a Sylvania Republican.
Republicans have also expressed the opinion that registering to vote should require an affirmative request, implying that it is not the state’s responsibility to register youth who have no interest in voting.
“Are we just trying to get a lot of people on the rolls, and two or three years later, we’re purging all of them because 90% never went to vote anyway?” asked Senate Majority Leader Steve Gooch, a Dahlonega Republican.
However, state officials said that if the law were passed, the number of voters on the list would become less accurate instead of more because the information coming to the secretary of state would decline in quantity. Evans, the State’s Elections Director, said that it was before the implementation of the automatic registration where as much as 11% of the registrations were flagged as problems due to a possible move, as compared to 4% of those registered after.
“We would see more people voting in the wrong precincts and the wrong contests for the wrong candidates because we would not get that information so consistently,” Evans said.
Additionally, opponents predicted a substantial decline in registrations, citing a 15-month window starting in 2021 when the state’s driver licensing system was redesigned to require voter opt-in.
“I think that incident is so important to understand because it is a view into the future of what this bill would do if it were implemented,” said Rep. Saira Draper, an Atlanta Democrat. “The result in that was a massive decline in voter registrations.”
Additional Measures Raise Concerns
The amendment states that somebody has changed their residency when the person registers to vote in a different state or locality. It instructs the registrants to use the US Postal Service’s national change of address list or commercial data to check whether the claimed address is theirs. This could make the counties capable of hiring Eagle AI, a private Georgia company that claims it possesses a secret datum that helps in finding irregular voter registrations.
The measure furthermore provides that a county election board can approve the resolutions of other voters to challenge a voter’s registration when that voter has registered in a different jurisdiction, has registered for a homestead exemption in a different jurisdiction, has a missing or incorrect birth date, is missing or incorrect address, and in case a voter has registered at a non-residential address, including a post office box.
Part of these arrangements would put the voters through some difficulty they did not fault causing. Peculiarities of data, e.g., data entry’s eventuality problem, cause some voters to be born in 1900 in state records, as reported by Associated Press.
The measure also creates an opportunity for counties to keep ballot elections on paper following the State Election Board’s approval. It could open the door for a jurisdiction to drop the state’s electronic ballot marking system with the election being over, a demand from many Republican activists. However, the resolution strikes a phrase about the use of paper ballots in emergency scenarios; Draper says this clause may cause problems.