Republican Georgia senators who say they are concerned about accurate voter lists advanced a bill Thursday to eliminate automatic voter registration, the primary tool to ensure voters’ names and addresses are correct.
The Senate Ethics Committee voted along party lines, 6-5, to approve legislation that would end automatic voter registration, a policy that registers eligible Georgians when they get their driver’s licenses unless they decline to sign up.
GOP senators pushed the legislation, Senate Bill 221, after a one-hour hearing that featured testimony from Brad Carver, one of 16 Republicans who attempted to award Georgia’s electoral votes to Donald Trump in 2020 even though he had lost to Democrat Joe Biden.
Ethics Chairman Max Burns said he’s concerned that automatic voter registration could result in voters being signed up twice, but officials from the secretary of state’s office said the policy ensures voters’ addresses are updated when they move and prevents noncitizens from registering.
“The intent is to ensure that every registered voter is registered accurately and there are no duplicate registrations,” said Burns, a Republican from Sylvania. “There needs to be some conscious decision of the Georgia voter saying, ‘I wish to ensure I’m registered in Georgia.’ ”
Republicans from the secretary of state’s office said automatic registration ensures that voters are registered at home addresses listed on their driver’s licenses, which voters then use as proof of ID. About 79% of registrations processed from the Department of Driver Services are updates to existing registrations, not new registrations, according to state election officials.
“The automated process we have right now from DDS is the best voter list maintenance tool we have to make sure our voter rolls are accurate and up to date,” said Charlene McGowan, general counsel for Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. “It’s also the best way to do citizenship verification.”
Democrats opposed the amended bill that was unveiled Wednesday.
Miguel Martinez/AJC
Miguel Martinez/AJC
“It actually undermines the goals of your bill: to make the voter rolls clean and increase voter security,” state Rep. Saira Draper, a Democrat from Atlanta, said during public comments to the committee. “All of that information is tied to a state-issued verified voter ID.”
Georgia is one of 24 states with automatic voter registration, which was implemented by Republican Gov. Brian Kemp in 2016 when he was secretary of state. There are nearly 8 million registered voters in Georgia.
Carver, the Trump elector and an officer of the Georgia Republican Party, said the proposal wouldn’t hamper anyone from registering to vote.
“What this does is it prevents having duplicative voter registrations, which is a huge problem,” Carver said. “The change (to automatic registration) has led to the issue that we have today with the voter rolls in Georgia.”
Senate Bill 221 is the latest measure pushed by Republicans in the wake of Trump’s loss to Biden. Republicans have couched their bills as an attempt to “restore voter confidence” after Trump promoted the false narrative that the election was stolen, despite three vote counts and repeated investigations proving otherwise.
JOHN SPINK / AJC
JOHN SPINK / AJC
Carver, at the time, blamed Trump’s defeat on a “significant number of election irregularities,” not the fact that the former president got fewer votes. He chaired a GOP task force to recommend election law changes.
While Carver told the committee that duplicate registrations are a “huge problem,” public voter registration records show they are rare, and they’re corrected when detected by election officials. Under Georgia law, each voter can only vote once in each election, and they must show ID before casting a ballot.
“By removing that (automatic registration), we would actually be making voter rolls less accurate,” said state Sen. Derek Mallow, a Democrat from Savannah.
Georgia inadvertently eliminated automatic voter registration in 2021, when a change to the Department of Driver Services’ website required voters to click a button to register instead of signing them up by default. The change caused a drastic decline in new registrations and updates to voters’ information, including changes to their addresses and names.
Automatic registration was restored in Georgia following a series of articles by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Besides ending automatic registration, Senate Bill 221 would make it easier for residents to challenge the eligibility of voters. Over 100,000 voter registrations have been challenged since Georgia’s 2021 election law allowed anyone to file an unlimited number of challenges, a cause taken up by Republican activists.
The legislation included several bipartisan items as well, such as prohibiting county election boards from considering voter challenges within 45 days of an election and allowing homeless voters to register at the address of their county’s courthouse.
The bill could soon be considered by the entire state Senate.
State legislators are also considering election bills that would eliminate computer codes from ballots, investigate Raffensperger involving allegations of election problems, and criminalize deepfakes that impersonate candidates to deceive voters.
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