Lawmakers in Georgia are expected to consider sweeping changes to the state’s election rules before the conclusion of legislative session Thursday, leaving local officials on alert for policies that might need to be implemented ahead of November, the Georgia Recorder reported.
The proposals, all approved last week by various legislative committees, address everything from election worker qualifications to the number of voting machines in use on Election Day. One bill would change the tabulation process by replacing a ballot QR code with readable text. Another would require the secretary of state to scan and upload ballots to a website for public perusal following an election. Members of the public could file open records requests to observe the scanning process at their local election office and, for a fee, request a copy of specific ballots.
A third proposal clarifies voter eligibility requirements and the criteria to challenge it. Under the bill, a local registrar could uphold an eligibility challenge for “probable cause,” including a voter being registered at a nonresidential address or in a different jurisdiction. Election officials would be required to contact those voters, who could resolve the challenge by providing proof of their eligibility.
Supporters said the bill aimed to clarify a 2021 law that empowered voters to challenge other people’s eligibility based on their own suspicions that the person is voting somewhere other than where they reside. More than 100,000 voter challenges have been filed since the law took effect, according to voting rights groups, who said they appreciated the attempt at clarity but doubted the bill would reduce the number of bogus disputes. Others scoffed at the idea of affording voters the “opportunity” to prove their own eligibility.
“When you’re met with the fact that you’ve been challenged at the ballot box,” said state Sen. Jason Esteves, an Atlanta Democrat, “that is not the opportunity to be joyful about the democratic process.”
The democratic process did not spark joy for independent legislative candidates in South Dakota, who operated for months under guidance directing them to collect far more petition signatures than is required to appear on the ballot under state law. The guidelines, posted on the secretary of state’s website, were updated only after a retired attorney flagged the errors. By that point, they’d been online for two months, South Dakota Searchlight reported.
The discrepancies were staggering. The original list directed independent legislative candidates in two Sioux Falls-area districts to collect 1,029 signatures. The real numbers: 114 and 88. On March 8, after Davis reported the errors, the numbers were changed to 114 and 88, respectively. Independent candidates in two Rapid City-area districts were initially told to collect 454 signatures; really, they needed just 115 and 99.
The mistake should have been obvious to anyone with a passing understanding of state election law, which requires candidates to collect a number of signatured equal to 1% of the votes cast in their district in the last gubernatorial election. Each legislative district has around 25,000 people, based on 2020 census data — meaning that no legislative candidate would need to collect more than 250 signatures, even if every single voter participated in the most recent gubernatorial race.
Rachel Soulek, director of the Division of Elections within the South Dakota secretary of state’s office, refused to discuss the issue by phone but offered a wordy explanation by email, which really needed only this one sentence: “A staff person had an error in our calculations when putting the signature requirements together.”
Her office notified county auditors once it updated the totals, she added
U.S. Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) won’t need to collect signatures in his run for Senate Republican leader — which is probably a good thing, given the jeers elicited by his photo at a state GOP fundraiser in September. In normal times, a politician might take that as a sign to rethink his plans. But “these aren’t normal times,” Thune told Searchlight.
It’s a bit of a full-circle moment for Thune, who won his Senate seat in 2004 by ousting then-Minority Leader Tom Daschle, a Democrat. The victory elevated him to hero status in the GOP — albeit a very different GOP, he acknowledged. But for the most part, Thune said, he hasn’t changed along with it.
“The one thing that I keep in perspective is that I certainly haven’t changed my views,” he said. “I have the same conservative, core values that I’ve had my entire time in public life and prior to it. I think that these days, politics sometimes revolves around personalities more so than it does the issues. But if you look at the core values — the things that I ran on and ran for — that’s still the same person I am.”
There’s still a place for that type of Republican in the party, he added.
“Just bringing right-of-center, conservative, common sense to the big issues of the day, whether it’s how we deal with the border, how we deal with the economy, some of the cultural issues. I’m still about limited government, personal freedom coupled with individual responsibility, economic freedom, free markets, free enterprise, strong national defense,” he said. “Those are the core Republican values that I hold dear and that I want to be able to advocate here in Washington.”
