WASHINGTON — Georgia’s 2022 election season ended dramatically last week, but that was because of the closely watched Senate runoff that solidified Democratic control of the chamber and not for any large-scale problems with voting.
That led Republicans in the state to say concerns over a 2021 law that imposed several new restrictions on voting were overblown.
“Georgia’s election system has been challenged and scrutinized and criticized and passed every test,” Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said in a statement after Tuesday’s runoff, citing high turnout.
Voting rights and community groups say their grassroots efforts to work around the new restrictions were key to the relatively strong turnout. But they also caution that they don’t know how many people might have been deterred from voting.
In his victory speech, Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock said he did not share the rosy sentiment about this year’s election.
“Now there will be those both in our state and across the country who will point to our victory tonight and try to use it to argue there is no voter suppression in Georgia,” he said. “The fact that millions of Georgians endured hours in lines — and were willing to spend hours in line, lines that wrapped around buildings and went on for blocks, lines in the cold, lines in the rain — is most certainly not a sign voter suppression does not exist.”
The overhaul of the state’s election laws, known as Senate Bill 202, was passed by the Republican-controlled Legislature after Democrats won the 2020 presidential contest and two Senate runoff elections in early 2021.
The law shortened the time period to request an absentee ballot and addressed several issues that had arisen during the pandemic election of 2020. To ease the process for voters concerned about COVID-19, the state created an online portal for mail ballot requests while counties deployed drop boxes.
After the 2020 election, state lawmakers said voters should be required to sign absentee ballot applications by hand, meaning they needed access to a printer. And while lawmakers established drop boxes as legal, they put limits on how many could be used by each jurisdiction and when those boxes would be accessible. This resulted in fewer drop boxes in the state’s most populous counties.
The new law also required a driver’s license or other ID rather than a signature for requesting a mailed ballot.
Also under the law, the runoff period was shortened, creating more hurdles. Saturday voting almost didn’t occur during this year’s runoff, after state election officials interpreted state law to mean it could not be held if it followed a holiday — in this case Thanksgiving and the Friday afterward. Democrats sued over the issue and won in state court.
The new law also shortened the runoff period from nine weeks to four weeks.
