WaPo Editorial Board: Georgia lawmakers are trying to pass another bad election bill

[Nevilledog]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/04/01/georgia-lawmakers-are-trying-pass-another-bad-election-bill/

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https://archive.ph/XX139

Georgia was ground zero in the fight over U.S. democracy last year, as Republican state lawmakers forced through a noxious bill packed with unnecessary voting restrictions, inspired by former president Donald Trump’s lies about fraud in the 2020 election. This year, Mr. Trump is backing a slate of candidates in the state — from governor to insurance commissioner — picked exclusively for their devotion to false claims about the 2020 vote. And some state lawmakers are trying once again to change election rules based on these falsehoods. As before, they would make elections less fair and less secure — the opposite of what they claim to want.
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The Georgia House passed a bill that would empower the Georgia Bureau of Investigation to launch election probes, a move akin to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) demanding a new election police unit under his control. Georgia’s secretary of state already has the power to investigate election crimes. But Mr. Trump has lambasted the sitting secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, for failing to swing the 2020 vote the former president’s way. Not only would the bill further humiliate Mr. Raffensperger, it also would risk chilling legitimate election activity by making voting activists and even individual voters fear aggressive, politicized investigations. The 2020 Georgia vote was verified and reverified; there was no uptick in election crime requiring a concerted new law enforcement response.

The bill would also mandate that poll watchers get “meaningful access” to polling places and ballot-counting facilities. This sounds good, but local election officials warn that the provision would make it even harder to deal with aggressive partisan observers and even risks ballot privacy. Some of the wackiest “evidence” of 2020 fraud came from GOP poll watchers who misunderstood what they were seeing. As Trump-inspired Republicans seek to “stop the steal,” observers who believe themselves patriots fighting against dark plots could get disruptive and unruly. Provisions such as these — Georgia lawmakers are not the only ones to embrace one — might make election workers fear they are breaking a law when they are just trying to run an orderly vote.

Yet another provision would require county workers to painstakingly count hundreds of blank sheets of paper to account for the materials on which ballots are printed, a massive, tedious mandate that would make it hard to retain good poll workers.

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