Today’s top headlines:
Rant of the day: Stop the General Assembly's Voter Suppression bill.
You knew it was coming. Given the overwhelming success of the primary absentee ballot push -- in terms of voter health protection and turnout -- some pencil head in the General Assembly would try to stop it from happening again.
According to Thursday's Atlanta Journal-Constitution, a House committee wants to stop Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger -- or anyone else for that matter -- from sending voters absentee ballot applications. The idea: To add a few roadblocks to those hoping to continue to voting from home.
Raffensperger mass mailed more than 6.9 million applications earlier this year amid growing concerns about the coronavirus pandemic. The threat already had delayed one primary in Georgia and the health risk was growing, especially for one of the state's most active voter bases -- those of us 60 and older.
It was an unqualified success across the state and in Northwest Georgia. More than 1.1 million people voted by absentee. Hundreds of thousands of people avoided potential infection by voting either by mail or else delivering ballots in conveniently placed "drop boxes" in Georgia counties. Floyd County had two such boxes; Bartow had five.
But now voter suppressionists in the state House are whining about long voter lines on June 9, alleged voter fraud opportunities and a late vote count as their reasons to prevent another mass mailing. Heck, we're used to late vote counts in Floyd County so what's the issue? Never mind that Georgia is recording a surge in new coronavirus cases each day this week and we have runoff elections on Aug. 11 as well as a general election on Nov. 3.
The real reason? Probably because of a surge in Democratic votes in the primary.
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