Local election officials recommended a series of changes to state election laws Friday aimed at restoring public trust in the voting process.
“Nothing bothers me more than knowing that the process is not trusted,” Deidre Holden, elections director in Paulding County, told members of a Georgia House study committee formed to evaluate the state’s current election laws and propose improvements.
“When our voters come to cast their vote, they should never leave there with a doubt in their mind that their vote is going to count. They should leave with confidence, and it’s very unfortunate we’re not seeing that.”
Some of the changes Holden and other local election officials testifying at a daylong hearing in Rockmart suggested would alter ballots to create greater transparency, while others ranged from tightening up voter registration requirements to prohibiting rules changes close to Election Day.
Holden said giving voters the ability to register automatically when they apply for a driver’s license – a change the General Assembly made early in the last decade – is failing because it’s adding voters to the rolls who may not be eligible to vote and weren’t intending to register.
“We see more felons registering not knowing they’re registering,” she said. “You see individuals who don’t want to register that get registered. A lot of non-citizens are registering, and it’s producing many duplicate applications.”
But Rep. Saira Draper, D-Atlanta, a member of the study committee, said the current “opt-out” provision – which automatically registers voters who apply for a driver’s license unless they specifically decline to register – is having positive results.
“We became one of the most registered states in the country,” she said.
Draper suggested elections officials find ways to make voters more aware that they’re registering to vote when they apply for a driver’s license without getting rid of the opt-out provision.
Holden also recommended returning to a provision in state election law that prohibited the State Election Board (SEB) from changing rules governing elections within 90 days of Election Day. While a Fulton County Superior Court judge invalidated seven rules changes the Republican-controlled SEB made within weeks of last November’s elections, Holden said the uncertainty disrupted local elections offices.
“We spent 2024 in a state of confusion because of what the SEB had implemented,” she said. “We didn’t know if we had trained our poll workers right or whether we were going to have to retrain them.”
Noah Beck, Polk County’s election director, asked committee members to support legislation moving back the deadline for absentee ballot applications by seven hours, from 11:59 p.m. 11 days before Election Day to 5 p.m. He said allowing applications to come into empty election offices after the close of the business day contributes to public mistrust of the process and causes delays in getting absentee ballots out to voters.
“Moving it to 5 p.m. would be better suited not only to the voter but to the administrators,” Beck said. “End-of-the-day processing would allow us to have better fulfillment times and make it where we’re gambling less on the post office.”
Veronica Johnson, elections director in Lee County, suggested lawmakers either eliminate absentee ballot drop boxes or at least adopt additional guardrails surrounding their use. Drop boxes were adopted during the pandemic to prevent the spread of COVID-19, but detractors have questioned the effectiveness of security measures taken to prevent voter fraud connected with drop boxes.
Holden also recommended several more fundamental changes to the voting process, including getting rid of the requirement that candidates win a majority of the vote and allowing those who capture a plurality to be declared the winner.
She said that would reduce the number of expensive runoffs, which tend to draw low voter turnouts. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has advocated doing away with general-election runoffs altogether.
Holden also proposed letting voters cast their ballots anywhere in the county where they are registered rather than having to go to one specific voting location.
But the most far-reaching change discussed Friday could lead to an overhaul of Georgia ballots. The General Assembly passed legislation last year calling for eliminating QR codes from paper ballots, which tend to confuse voters, by July of next year.
Holden said the next logical step would be to get rid of voting machines altogether and switch to hand-marked paper ballots, a change election watchdog groups have long advocated.
“That’s what our voters want,” she said to applause from supporters of hand-marked paper ballots in the audience. “When they fill in that bubble, they know who they voted for.”
The study committee faces a Dec. 1 deadline to deliver recommendations to the full House.
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Dave Williams | Capitol Beat News Service
Dave Williams is the Bureau Chief for Capitol Beat News Service. He is a veteran reporter who has reported on Georgia state government and politics since 1999. Before that, he covered Georgia’s congressional delegation in Washington, D.C.
