A Georgia legislative committee
voted last week to cut the state's early voting period by nearly half, from 21 days to just 12. Their proposal would also prevent counties from allowing more than four hours of voting on weekends. This is after Georgia cut early voting in 2011, from 45 days prior to an election to the current 21.
The new move comes after a 2014 election in which 44% of voters—disproportionately minorities—cast their ballot early. Many counties, responding to popular demand, offered Sunday voting for the first time.
Rep. Carolyn Hugley, a member of the Democratic legislative leadership, said the scheme is an effort to produce an electorate that's more favorable to the GOP. "We cannot choose the electorate, the electorate chooses us," Hugley said. "And it looks like somebody has an idea that they want to choose who is going to make the decisions, based on the patterns of how people vote." […]
Over the last decade, Georgia's demographics have changed dramatically, thanks to an influx of Hispanics and blacks that threatens to consign the state's whites to minority status. Hugley said she thinks that’s playing into Republican thinking. "I just question whether or not that’s part of it," said Hugley. "Because the reasons we’re being given are not reasons that make good sense."
Republicans say that it's about making voting availability uniform across all the counties, since some chose to allow 21 days of early voting and to offer it on Saturdays and Sundays, while other counties had less generous opportunities for voting. So of course, Georgia Republicans decide to
cut voting for all counties instead of making all counties provide three weeks of early voting.
Elizabeth Poythress, the president of the Georgia chapter of the League of Women Voters, noted that in some areas of the state, voters stood in line for three or four hours on election day in 2010 and called this new effort "horrible."