Hundreds of Georgia cities and towns would be able to cut early voting from three weeks to one week under a bill that cleared the Senate Ethics Committee on Tuesday.
House Bill 891 will allow more than 500 municipal governments to seek legislative approval for reducing early voting, a change some fear could hurt minority voters. The Ethics Committee Tuesday amended the bill after hearing testimony from critics. As originally written, the bill would have automatically reduced early voting in municipal elections and required cities that wanted to keep three weeks of voting to seek legislative approval.
But even with the change, some worry that about the effects of a shortened voting process.
“It still infringes upon the voting rights of Georgians,” said Elizabeth Poythress, president of the League of Women Voters of Georgia.
Supporters of allowing cities to limit early voting said it would save taxpayer money while still providing ample time for people to cast their ballot.
“Our members want people to show up and vote,” said Amy Henderson of the Georgia Municipal Association. “But they also have that responsibility to the taxpayers to be good stewards of public funds.”
The debate follows last summer’s Supreme Court decision that gave state and local governments across the South and elsewhere greater freedom to modify election practices without federal oversight.
Under the Voting Rights Act of 1965, states with a history of racial discrimination had to seek advanced approval of election changes from the Justice Department to ensure minority voting rights were protected. The department worked to overturn changes that diluted minority voting power.
The Supreme Court struck down a provision of the Voting Rights Act, effectively ending federal pre-clearance of election changes. Discriminatory laws are still illegal. But fighting them now often means filing a lawsuit under another section of the Act.
Since the court’s decision, the Justice Department has filed a number of high-profile lawsuits. Among them: A challenge to a recent North Carolina law that cuts early voting by a week, ends same-day voter registration and requires voters to have photo IDs. The Justice Department argues the intent of North Carolina’s law is to suppress voter turnout, especially among minorities and low-income voters.
Voting rights advocates in Georgia also have threatened to challenge HB 891 in court if it becomes law.
“We intend on mortgaging every asset we have in defending full and fair participation in the political process,” said Georgia NAACP President Francys Johnson. “If we don’t, the last 50 years of our work will be meaningless.”
Black voters cast about a third of early ballots in Georgia in the 2008 and 2012 general elections.
The GMA’s Henderson said the early voting is not cost effective in many small communities. She said cities and towns across Georgia spend thousands of dollars to staff early voting booths in low-turnout municipal elections.
She cited the town of Leslie in south Georgia, which has 220 registered voters and an annual budget of about $129,000. The town spent about $4,600 on early voting in a recent election in which just 24 people cast early ballots.
“We feel like (one week) is plenty of time, along with absentee ballots, for people in those communities to cast their ballots without costing the city so much money,” Henderson said.
Charles Bullock, a political scientist at the University of Georgia, said early voting has been popular with the public. He said that scaling it back to one week might not substantially affect turnout because studies show turnout for such voting increases closer to Election Day.
Nonetheless, Bullock said, it’s unclear how a proposal to scale back early voting would fare in court.
Rep. Barry Fleming, R-Harlem, the bill’s sponsor, said he’s not worried about a legal challenge. He noted that the Justice Department approved Georgia’s plan to scale back early voting from 45 days to three weeks in 2011.
HB 891 passed the House on a 146-25 vote with bipartisan support. After Tuesday’s Senate Ethics Committee vote, the amended bill must clear the full Senate before returning to the House for a vote on the latest version.
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