Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger on Tuesday called for a nationwide ban on ballot harvesting.
Ballot harvesting permits private individuals to collect other voters’ ballots and then submit those ballots to various polling stations.
Raffensperger, at a press conference at the state capitol, said no one person, especially a partisan actor, should act as a conduit between a voter and an election official.
“That is why my first act as Secretary of State was to get ballot harvesting banned in the state of Georgia,” Raffensperger said.
“An election in North Carolina was overturned because of ballot harvesting and also in New Jersey, related to ballot harvesting schemes. This should be illegal nationwide.”
Raffensperger called for a ballot harvesting ban one week after Georgia gubernatorial candidate Vernon Jones called on the federal government to investigate new claims of ballot harvesting in Georgia. Georgia authorities are investigating an allegation of systematic ballot harvesting during the state’s 2020 general election and subsequent U.S. Senate runoff. Jones said he had documented at least one instance of a drop box location not on public or municipal property, and, if true, that violates Georgia law.
Raffensperger, at Tuesday’s press conference, called on a federal law to cut down the blackout period for elections officials to perform voter roll maintenance.
“As we saw in 2020, the 90-day federal blackout period before an election makes it essentially impossible for us to update our voter rolls during an election year. Studies show that 11 percent of all Americans move every year,” Raffensperger said.
“In Georgia that 11 percent would represent 200,000 Georgians. What that leads to is voter lists becoming outdated by the time that the elections begin.”
Raffensperger also called for national voter ID laws, which he said 80 percent of all Americans support. He then repeated a call he first made in August to allow only American citizens to vote. This, via a Constitutional amendment.
President Joe Biden and other liberals lied about Georgia’s new voter integrity law, SB 202, Raffensperger said.
Major League Baseball (MLB) executives, incensed over the law, pulled last year’s All-Star Game out of Atlanta and moved it to Colorado. The move cost Atlanta more than $100 million in revenue.
Georgia’s new voter integrity law requires voter ID on all absentee ballots. The law also increases oversight of local election boards that fail to follow state election law, and secures drop boxes around the clock. Officials at Coca-Cola and Delta Airlines announced last year that they also opposed SB 202.
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Chris Butler is an investigative journalist at The Tennessee Star and The Georgia Star News. Follow Chris on Facebook, Twitter, Parler, and GETTR. Email tips to [email protected].
