New Georgia law makes voter intimidation easier, critics say; affects Black voters most
New Georgia law makes voter intimidation easier, critics say; affects Black voters most
Candace Smith did everything right.
During the May 2024 state primary in Georgia, the Atlanta attorney voted early, giving herself time to sort out any issues that might occur and ensure that her vote would be counted.
But on Election Day, when she went to check her ballot status online, a warning popped up. Someone had submitted a challenge to her voter registration status.
“I found it shocking,” Smith said, adding that she has been an active voter in Fulton County for decades, and that the challenge did not include any reason or evidence. “Nothing about it made any sense.”
Smith, an attorney and longtime proponent of voting rights efforts in Georgia, was well positioned to advocate for her rights. She quickly contacted the Fulton County Elections Office, raising the issue to a supervisor to make doubly sure that her ballot had counted. But for the average person, she said, encountering a voter challenge could pose an insurmountable barrier. Had she less time or knowledge about the complex web of election infrastructure, she said, “that might be an issue that prevented me from voting, and it also might be something that would deter me from bothering in the fall.”
Citizen voter challenges, once an obscure practice, have transformed into a mass movement in Georgia, with conservative activists challenging hundreds of thousands of voter registrations in the last several years. Often, the waves of voter challenges coincide with competitive, high-profile elections, with election conspiracy theorists using complaints of rampant voter fraud to cast doubt on election results. Voters of color — and Black voters in particular — have been disproportionately impacted by these vast disenfranchisement campaigns.
And voting rights experts say a newly-passed election law, known as SB 189, is likely to make the problem worse.