Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger on Wednesday called for an end to “no-excuse” absentee voting in the state, reports the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
"The no-excuse system voted into law in 2005 -- long before most of you, if not all of you, long before I was in the General Assembly -- it makes no sense when we have three weeks of in-person early voting available," Raffensberger told the House Governmental Affairs Committee. "It opens the door to potential illegal voting, especially in light of the federal rules that deny us the ability to keep voter lists, registration files, clean."
Anyone in Georgia can cast an absentee ballot without having to give a reason, a law enacted in 2005.
About 34 percent of Biden voters submitted absentee ballots compared with 18 percent of Trump voters in Georgia. At least 600,000 Georgians voted by absentee ballot in the 2020 presidential election.
State Rep. Rhonda Burnough, a Democrat, said getting rid of absentee voting would disenfranchise a lot of voters “because they wouldn’t want to come out and stand in line. If you don’t want to have a no-excuse-based system for absentee voting, what are we going to do about all the lines and the perception that Georgia doesn’t know how to run an election?”
Raffensperger’s comments come as more than 1.2 million Georgians have requested absentee ballots in the state ahead of the Senate runoff race in January.
"We know from the numbers that we’re in a good place; 1.2 million absentee ballots have been requested thus far," Stacey Abrams told CNN’s Jake Tapper on "State of the Union." "Just to put that into context, 1.3 million were requested for all of the general election."
Solange Reyner ✉
Solange Reyner is a writer and editor for Newsmax. She has more than 15 years in the journalism industry reporting and covering news, sports and politics.
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