In Georgia, turnout is up under – or despite – new voting rules

There’s a steady stream of voters filing into the former Sam’s Club in Stonecrest, Georgia, by the time Dele Lowman Smith arrives at 10 a.m. and greets the poll workers.

Overall, early voting is going smoothly, with numbers almost as high as in the 2020 presidential election – virtually unheard of for a midterm. It hasn’t been as easy as it looks. 

As chair of the Board of Registration and Elections in DeKalb County, a majority-Black area that includes part of the Atlanta metro area, Ms. Lowman Smith has had to scramble to implement changes required by a 2021 state voting law that sparked controversy across the United States.

She sees Georgia as a microcosm of the entire country right now – a newly nonwhite-majority state, in which voters of color are shifting the state’s longtime political leanings and leading to what Ms. Lowman Smith describes as a “partisan power struggle” over voting.

During the 2020 election, at the height of the pandemic, DeKalb installed more than 30 drop boxes to increase access for voters and ease pressure on poll workers. Now the county is only allowed half a dozen, with the rest sitting in storage. DeKalb’s elections board recently met to consider a challenge to 412 voters on the rolls – the new law allows unlimited challenges, with some 65,000 brought statewide so far – and it’s hearing chatter about more in the works. Ms. Lowman Smith and her team are also bracing for people who show up at the wrong polling place on Election Day, since the new law limits the use of provisional ballots. 

“Like many of the voters that we work on behalf of, we are motivated to work harder by barriers that are erected that could prevent our citizens from voting,” says Ms. Lowman Smith, as voters cycle through the turquoise voting booths.

For the past two years, Georgia has been ground zero for a national debate about how best to ensure election integrity while safeguarding the rights of eligible voters. According to the GOP-run state legislature, its package of new voting rules was designed to restore confidence across the political spectrum, with outside advocates holding it up as a model for other states. But critics have assailed the bill as a partisan effort to suppress the rising multiracial tide that put Georgia in Joe Biden’s column in 2020 and sent two Democrats to the U.S. Senate in January 2021. 

Some see this cycle’s record turnout as proof that concerns about voter suppression were unfounded. As of Nov. 1, a total of 1,947,191 voters had cast a ballot, just under the 1,979,963 who had done so at this point in the 2020 presidential election and nearly 750,000 higher than in 2018, according to the Georgia secretary of state’s office.

“All these claims that these reforms will somehow keep people from voting have turned out to be totally false,” says Hans von Spakovsky, a former member of the Federal Election Commission who now runs the Election Law Reform Initiative at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. 

Others see the high turnout as a measure of determination by people who feel their rights are being threatened and are voting early in case any problems arise with their registration or ballots. 

“The fact that people are voting is in spite of S.B. 202, not because of it,” said voting rights advocate and Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams in her final debate with Republican Gov. Brian Kemp on Oct. 30. 

Ms. Abrams, through her organization Fair Fight Action, brought a lawsuit against the state after narrowly losing the 2018 election to Mr. Kemp, claiming “serious and unconstitutional flaws in Georgia’s elections process.” Fair Fight, which was joined by several faith-based organizations including Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, alleged violations of due process, equal protection, the right to vote, and the ban on racial discrimination in voting.

This fall, an Obama-appointed judge ruled against Fair Fight’s claims that a number of barriers in the 2018 election were racially discriminatory – including absentee ballot rules and the “exact match” verification requirement for voter applications. 

“Although Georgia’s election system is not perfect, the challenged practices violate neither the constitution nor the [Voting Rights Act],” wrote U.S. District Judge Steve Jones in his 288-page decision.  

Fallout from the 2020 election

In 2020, amid concerns about in-person voting during the COVID-19 pandemic, many states rapidly scaled up their use of mail-in ballots and relaxed protocols around absentee voting. To some, that raised concerns about the security of the voting process. 

Republican Michael Cogan, the former chair of the Maryland Board of Elections who oversaw the 2020 vote and has since moved to Georgia, says he gives tremendous credit to the administrators, local boards, and staff for all they did to pull off Maryland’s first election held primarily by mail. But he admits he still has questions about some of his decisions, such as using drop boxes, even with 24/7 surveillance.

“Anytime you’re working in an emergency situation, you’re always worried you cut one corner too short,”  says Mr. Cogan. “In order to make it more possible to vote, did I, by trying to solve this problem, just open up the door to another problem?”

Then-President Donald Trump stoked and exploited those fears, claiming there had been widespread fraud despite repeatedly being told by members of his own inner circle that there was no evidence of it. In a secretly recorded phone call that was later made public, he pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” 11,780 votes – one more than the margin by which he had lost the state to Mr. Biden. Secretary Raffensperger refused. But many Republicans in Georgia and elsewhere believed Mr. Trump’s claim that 2020 election was fraudulent, leading to an unprecedented civilian assault on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, that interrupted the ceremonial tallying of the electoral count. 

Two months later, Georgia’s legislature passed the Election Integrity Act of 2021, known as S.B. 202, which placed new guardrails on the absentee and mail-in voting process. Among other things, the law prohibits election officials from automatically mailing absentee ballot applications to all voters, requires those voting absentee to provide photo ID, effectively limits both the number and hours of access to drop boxes in urban areas, and gives the state legislature – currently controlled by Republicans – more influence over both state and local election authorities. 

Georgia House Speaker David Ralston said the measures were geared toward “making sure the same level of security you have when you go to vote in person is the level of security when you vote by mail.”

Critics of voter ID laws say they disproportionately affect voters of color and other traditionally disadvantaged groups, who are less likely to have driver’s licenses or other forms of photo ID. But Heritage’s Mr. von Spakovsky points to a study from the National Bureau of Economic Research that compared voter turnout from 2008 to 2018 in all 50 states and found that voter ID laws had “no negative effect on registration or turnout, overall or for any group defined by race, gender, age, or party affiliation.”

The study also found that the requirements had no effect on fraud, a key reason cited by advocates of voter ID. While proven instances of voter fraud are low – one study put it at less than 0.00000013% of ballots cast in federal elections – a Heritage database of just under 1,400 proven fraud cases shows the different ways it can happen. They mainly involve local elections, and include two dozen cases that resulted in the election being overturned.

Concerns about voter fraud are just one factor that Republican legislators in Georgia cited as rationale for the new provisions. The law’s authors also argued it would reduce the burden on election officials, in part by shortening the window for absentee ballots, and promote uniformity in voting across the state, including by banning outside grant funding that was unevenly distributed and by giving the state more power to address persistent dysfunction at the county level that in the past led to long lines and problems processing absentee ballots. 

“In Georgia, it’s easy to vote and hard to cheat, and I’m committed to keeping it that way,” said Governor Kemp in the Oct. 30 debate with Ms. Abrams. 

“A redux of Jim Crow”

Part of the reason the debate is so heated is that higher Black turnout in Georgia is likely to help Democrats – still overwhelmingly the party of choice for Black voters, although that support has been softening at the margins in recent years.

In Swainsboro, a city of 7,500 several hours east of Atlanta, Black residents make up more than half the population, but persistently low voter turnout means white Republican candidates tend to win – by a lot. 

“You don’t feel like your issues are being looked after,” says Shayna Boston, an entrepreneur who ran for mayor last year and lost, 520 to 868. She and other local Democrats are pushing hard to boost registration and turnout this year, following Ms. Abrams’ model.

While the October ruling was a blow to Ms. Abrams, she maintains that her legal challenges and advocacy have already resulted in substantial changes that opened the way for more voters of color to register and vote, including the reinstatement of more than 22,000 voters removed from the rolls. 

She also continues to assert racial discrimination and voter suppression, contrary to the judge’s ruling. 

An Associated Press investigation found that nearly 70% of the 53,000 applications flagged in 2018 because a voter’s name did not match that on his or her government ID belonged to Black voters – roughly twice the share of Georgia’s Black population. 

Ms. Abrams, who says her father was arrested as a teenager for helping Black people to register to vote, called the 2021 bill “a redux of Jim Crow in a suit and tie.” 

Critics of S.B. 202 also fault the law for giving the legislature more control over the state elections board as well as giving it power to suspend county officials. As a result of the law, Mr. Raffensperger, the secretary of state who stood up to Mr. Trump, was removed from the state elections board. 

Perhaps the most infamous measure in the bill bans people from handing out food and water within 25 feet of voters waiting in line, or 150 feet of a polling place. Often left out is the context: The ban is part of a broader prohibition on soliciting votes through gifts or other means.

There are also concerns about the toll the law’s provisions is taking on those tasked with enforcing it. Ms. Lowman Smith admits it can be challenging to face persistent resistance after all the “clear evidence and arguments” that citizen representatives, attorneys, and election officials have presented.

“It is tiresome, it is frustrating, and at points it is angering,” says Ms. Lowman Smith, who is nevertheless determined to press on. “I hope we are setting the example in DeKalb County for the ways that election officials and ordinary, everyday citizens need to fight everywhere in the country to preserve this democracy.”