Republican officials at the Georgia State Capital want to require photo ID for absentee ballots in the state.
This, according to a new report on the Atlanta-based WABE. The station is affiliated with National Public Radio.
WABE reported that Georgia Speaker of the House David Ralston (R-Blue Ridge) has formed a Special Committee on Election Integrity. Absentee voters in the state, the station went on to report, voted for current U.S. President Joe Biden by a vote of two to one.
“Many Georgians are concerned about the integrity of our election system. Some of those concerns may or may not be well-founded, but there may be others that are,” Ralston reportedly said at a Chamber of Commerce event last week.
The station went on to report that Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger want to get rid of the state’s signature match process and require photo ID.
“I requested that the Legislature pass a law to move us away from the subjective signature match to identify voters requesting an absentee, to a more objective measure using a unique identifier like a driver’s license number or state ID,” the station quoted Raffensperger as telling the Georgia General Assembly’s Joint Appropriations Committee this week.
Ralston, per the reporting of WABE, said he does not want to impose changes that are too drastic.
As The Georgia Star News reported Saturday, U.S. Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-GA-09) said government officials must secure the integrity of how people vote.
Clyde submitted a column to The Washington Examiner and said state-level officials during this year’s session of the Georgia General Assembly are prioritizing the issue of voter integrity. He also seemed to criticize Raffensperger for how he managed last year’s elections.
The Washington Examiner published Clyde’s column Thursday.
In the column, Clyde wrote that “so many states allowed fringe operators to bypass the power of their legislative bodies, and in doing so, knowingly trampled the U.S. Constitution.”
“In my home state of Georgia, we saw one of the most egregious examples in the country of the state’s legislative powers being overruled. In March 2020, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger entered into a Compromise Settlement Agreement and Release with the Democratic Party of Georgia, unilaterally altering the state’s statutory requirements for the examination and authentication of signatures on absentee ballots,” Clyde wrote.
“This agreement effectively bypassed the signature verification requirement mandated by Georgia law — a clear violation of Article II, section 1, clause 2 of the U.S. Constitution, as well as state law itself, which mandates that any election regulation must be ‘consistent with law.’”
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Chris Butler is an investigative journalist at The Tennessee Star. Follow Chris on Facebook. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “Poll Worker” by Phil Roeder. CC BY 2.0.
