Wednesday, March 03, 2021

election reform: a slight ray of hope

With the rampant cheating and fraud in the 2020 election (yes, there was plenty of evidence; if you think there wasn't, then you weren't paying attention, and/or you were listening to all the wrong news sources), many on the right have pinned their hopes on state-level election reform as one way to redress the situation we currently find ourselves in—one in which the left-Democrats are trying to make mail-in voting a permanent nationwide option.  This is on top of other nefarious measures such as allowing dead people to vote, using unreliable voting machines instead of hand-counting the votes, allowing people with no legitimate ID to vote, allowing prisoners and illegal immigrants to vote, etc.

So it's nice to know that Georgia, at least, is doing something about the problem:

Georgia House Passes Omnibus Election Reform Bill

Georgia’s House of Representatives passed an omnibus bill that would reform a range of election rules, including over absentee voting, voter ID for absentee voting, time limits for voting, and more.

The 66-page bill, HB 531 (pdf) passed the Republican majority chamber on a party line vote of 97-72 and is headed to the state Senate for further debate.

State Rep. Barry Fleming, a Republican, the main sponsor of the HB 531 bill, said that the proposal was designed to restore voters’ confidence in Georgia’s election system following the 2020 presidential election, which saw numerous allegations of voting irregularities and allegations of election fraud. 

Separately, the GOP-majority Senate on Feb. 23 introduced its own version of an omnibus election reform bill, SB 241 (pdf) that has some overlap with HB 531. One difference is that the Senate bill would eliminate no-excuse absentee voting, something that has been allowed in Georgia since 2005, whereas the House bill would still allow no-excuse absentee voting.



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