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What Georgia’s Voting Law Really Does
Author Name, ProPublica
2021-04-02 00:00:00
Offering food or water to voters waiting in line now risks misdemeanor charges.
Page 73: No person shall solicit votes in any manner or by any means or method, nor shall any person distribute or display any campaign material, nor shall any person give, offer to give, or participate in the giving of any money or gifts, including, but not limited to, food and drink, to an elector, nor shall any person solicit signatures for any petition, nor shall any person, other than election officials discharging their duties, establish or set up any tables or booths on any day in which ballots are being cast: (1) Within 150 feet of the outer edge of any building within which a polling place is established; (2) Within any polling place; or (3) Within 25 feet of any voter standing in line to vote at any polling place. These restrictions shall not apply to conduct occurring in private offices or areas which cannot be seen or heard by such electors. This Code section shall not be construed to prohibit a poll officer from distributing materials, as required by law, which are necessary for the purpose of instructing electors or from distributing materials prepared by the Secretary of State which are designed solely for the purpose of encouraging voter participation in the election being conducted or from making available self-service water from an unattended receptacle to an elector waiting in line to vote.
Perhaps no provision in the Georgia law has received more attention than this one, which effectively bars third-party groups or anyone else who is not an election worker from providing food and water to voters waiting in line. Republicans defended the provision, saying it is enforceable only within a 150-foot radius of polling places. Civil rights groups note that it also prevents assistance “within 25 feet of any voter standing in line to vote at any polling place.”
Long lines for voting in Georgia are an unfortunate reality, and are often found in the poorer, densely populated communities that tend to vote Democratic. During the primary election last June, when temperatures hovered above 80 degrees with high humidity, multiple voting locations across the state had lines in which voters waited more than two hours.
Numerous studies have shown that long lines deter people from voting. According to research by the Bipartisan Policy Center, an independent research group, over 560,000 voters did not cast ballots in 2016 “because of problems related to polling place management, including long lines.” In 2014, Stephen Pettigrew, then a Ph.D. candidate in Harvard’s department of government, conducted a study that found that more than 200,000 voters did not vote in the midterm elections that year because they had faced long lines during the 2012 election.
The new law does make it clear that it is legal for voters to drink from a water fountain, if one exists along the line to vote and provided they get the water themselves.
If you go to the wrong polling place, it will be (even) harder to vote.
Page 74: If a person presents himself or herself at a polling place, absentee polling place, or registration office in his or her county of residence in this state for the purpose of casting a ballot in a primary or election stating a good faith belief that he or she has timely registered to vote in such county of residence in such primary or election and the person’s name does not appear on the list of registered electors, the person shall be entitled to cast a provisional ballot in his or her county of residence in this state as provided in this Code section. If the person presents himself or herself at a polling place in the county in which he or she is registered to vote, but not at the precinct at which he or she is registered to vote, the poll officials shall inform the person of the polling location for the precinct where such person is registered to vote. The poll officials shall also inform such person that any votes cast by a provisional ballot in the wrong precinct will not be counted unless it is cast after 5 p.m. and before the regular time for the closing of the polls on the day of the primary, election, or runoff and unless the person executes a sworn statement, witnessed by the poll official, stating that he or she is unable to vote at his or her correct polling place prior to the closing of the polls and giving the reason therefor.
From 2012 to 2018, Georgia shuttered more than 214 voting precincts around the state, according to an investigation by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Those changes, many of which followed the Supreme Court’s hollowing out of the federal Voting Rights Act in 2013, confused many voters, who upon showing up to the wrong precinct had to vote with provisional ballots.
This provision removes even that remedy for voters who arrive at the wrong precinct before 5 p.m., requiring them to instead travel to the correct precinct or risk being disenfranchised.
Casting a provisional ballot after showing up at the wrong precinct was by far the most common reason for voting provisionally in the 2020 election in Georgia; roughly 44 percent of provisional ballots in the state were from “out of precinct voters,” according to data from the secretary of state’s office. And in Fulton County, 66 percent of the accepted provisional ballots were from “out of precinct” voters.
Of the 11,120 provisional ballots that were counted in the 2020 presidential election, Mr. Biden won 64 percent and Mr. Trump took 34 percent.
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[1] URL:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/02/us/politics/georgia-voting-law-annotated.html
[2] URL:
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/
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