Georgia-the Great State of Hypocrisy the ongoing fight to suppress voting and close our public schools

Well, this proved to be enough! Another article uncontrollably belching forth from my gullet. First we had all the craziness from the last governors election. The secretary of state Brian Kemp, running for governor while keeping his day job (park of his duties were to oversee elections). Nothing to see here! Move on, move on. Oh, by the way, he did manage to have enough legitimate votes thrown out that he just squeaked by to win over Stacy Abrams.

In the final month of the campaign, voting rights advocates took Kemp to court over an “exact-match” policy that held up 53,000 pending registrations, mostly of people of color, many over small typos, like a missing apostrophe or hyphen. “They’re still in Georgia. They’re still alive,” said Emmet Bondurant, an Atlanta-based attorney who challenged Georgia’s purge law in federal court.

Bondurant said the analysis is just more evidence that the state is using an overly broad formula that isn’t particularly accurate at identifying voters who should be cut because they’ve moved or died. “[They] were denied because of the excuse,” Bondurant said as he lowered his voice, and bounced his head from side to side, mocking supporters of the purges, “that we want to keep up-to-date rolls.”

Want more? From PBS news Dec. 18th 2019. Georgia election officials purged nearly 309,000 voter registrations from the state’s voting rolls this week, according to a list of cancelled registrations released by the secretary of state’s office on Wednesday.

A federal judge is set to hear arguments Thursday about whether some of those registrations should be reinstated. The hearing comes after Fair Fight Action, a voting rights advocacy group founded by Democrat Stacey Abrams, filed an emergency motion earlier this week asking the court to stop part of the purge.

U.S. District Judge Steve Jones allowed the purge to move forward Monday after a lawyer for the state said the voter maintenance program was already running and that any voters deemed to have been wrongly removed could have their registrations reinstated within 24 to 48 hours.

Nearly 5,000 voters were able to save their registrations from being canceled in recent months by voting in November, responding to mailed notices or having some other type of contact with election officials, according to the secretary of state’s office.

Fair Fight is challenging the removal of people who ended up on the purge list for inactivity, or “solely because they have not voted or had any other statutorily-defined ‘contact’ with election officials in the past seven years and have not responded to two notices seeking confirmation of their current address.” The final list of purged registrations shows that nearly 118,000 people were removed for this type of inactivity.

Fair Fight says a new law allows voters nine years of inactivity before being removed — compared to seven years under the old law. But the lawyer for the state countered that the people in question were placed on the inactive list before the new law took effect.

Voter purges in Georgia became a hot-button issue during last year’s race for governor between Abrams and Republican Brian Kemp, who won the race. Kemp served as secretary of state before being elected governor and oversaw aggressive voter purges during his tenure. Over 1.4 million voter registrations were canceled in Georgia between 2012 and 2018.

Next. Remember when the recounts started and Trump accused GA of a sloppy fraudulent election? I was deeply impressed with the presentations Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and especially the one by Gabriel Sterling, voting system implementation manager for the Georgia secretary of state’s office. If you didn’t watch it then check it out. Really well done. But what did they do next?

Georgia G.O.P. Passes Major Law to Limit Voting Amid Nationwide Push Democrats and voting rights groups have condemned such efforts, arguing that they unfairly target voters of color. They say the new law in Georgia particularly seeks to make voting harder for the state’s large Black population, which was crucial to President Biden’s triumph in Georgia in November and the success of Senators Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff in the January runoff elections.

Though the law is less stringent than the initial iterations of the bill, it introduces a raft of new restrictions for voting and elections in the state, including limiting drop boxes, stripping the secretary of state of some of his authority, imposing new oversight of county election boards, restricting who can vote with provisional ballots, and making it a crime to offer food or water to voters waiting in lines. The law also requires runoff elections to be held four weeks after the original vote, instead of the current nine weeks.

Here are the most significant changes to voting in the state, as written into the new law:

• Voters will now have less time to request absentee ballots.
• There are strict new ID requirements for absentee ballots.
• It’s now illegal for election officials to mail out absentee ballot applications to all voters.
• Drop boxes still exist … but barely.
• Mobile voting centers (think an R.V. where you can vote) are essentially banned.
• Early voting is expanded in a lot of small counties, but probably not in more populous ones.
• Offering food or water to voters waiting in line now risks misdemeanor charges.
• If you go to the wrong polling place, it will be (even) harder to vote.
• If election problems arise, a common occurrence, it is now more difficult to extend voting hours.
• With a mix of changes to vote-counting, high-turnout elections will probably mean a long wait for results.
• Election officials can no longer accept third-party funding (a measure that nods to right-wing conspiracy theories).
• With an eye toward voter fraud, the state attorney general will manage an election hotline.
• The Republican-controlled legislature has more control over the State Election Board.
• The secretary of state is removed as a voting member of the State Election Board.
• The G.O.P.-led legislature is empowered to suspend county election officials.
• Runoff elections will happen faster — and could become harder to manage.

Sounds fun, hah? And now, for more “good news”-

Kemp called for a parents’ bill of rights during his State of the State speech in early January. On Wednesday, two lawmakers, Sen. Clint Dixon, R-Buford, and Rep. Josh Bonner, R-Fayetteville, introduced legislation for him to that end.

Kemp said Wednesday the new Georgia legislation is intended to increase transparency and parent involvement in schools.

“At a time when our nation is more divided than ever, we’re leading the fight to ensure parents do not have any barriers which prevent them from playing an active role in their child’s education,” Kemp said in a statement. Really?

This guy apparently has a REALLY dark sense of humor here!

House Bill 1178 would guarantee that parents and guardians can review “all instructional materials” in their children’s classrooms. (By law, the state education board determines what falls into that category.) The school principal or district superintendent would have three days to produce the documents, though that can be extended to 30 days in some cases.

Parents could appeal to the local school board and even the state board of education, and schools would have to publish the rights and related procedures on their websites.

Can’t see any problems with this one, how about you? I am sure I can find many many more like this to continue with but, enough already. I not only live here, but my mother was from Columbus, GA, so I have family roots here. Spent much time with my Granny Riddle. I know damn well both are “spinning in there graves” over this shit!