ATLANTA — After historic turnout in both the general election and Jan. 5 Senate runoffs, Republican state lawmakers are pushing a flood of restrictive voting bills citing public “perception” that the elections were riddled with fraud.

GOP lawmakers have introduced dozens of bills that target absentee ballot voting after the increased use of mail-in ballots during the pandemic helped Democrats grab both the presidential vote in Georgia and two U.S. Senate seats.

Original measures ranged from adding additional ID requirements to both absentee ballot requests and ballots themselves to doing away with no-excuse mail-in voting altogether.

But the path to legislation that advocates say would burden Georgians’ ability to cast their ballots didn’t begin under the Gold Dome. It started before elections even took place and at the highest level of government.

Former President Donald Trump spent the weeks leading up to and after the election spreading false claims that the outcome in Georgia — and other states where he was not successful — was riddled with voter fraud.

The unfounded allegations were echoed by some of Georgia’s federal and state Republican lawmakers despite the fact that courts continued to throw out Trump’s legal challenges. 

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger repeatedly said his office — which was assisted by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation on multiple occasions — found no indication of “widespread” voter fraud and decried Trump’s massive disinformation campaign that was leading to death threats against state officials and low-level elections workers.

Now, GOP lawmakers are citing angry constituents as their reason for upending the state’s voting system.

Voting rights advocates are outraged and have called proposed bills “a horror show” for voters that specifically target minority communities.

Raffensperger grabbed the national spotlight for a leaked call between himself and Trump where the president urged him to “find” votes. The Secretary of State office has yet to endorse any of the bills and even called them the result of disinformation spread about the election.

“At the end of the day, many of these bills are reactionary to a three-month disinformation campaign that could have been prevented,” a spokesperson for the office said in a statement.

Democrats in the Georgia Statehouse are condemning their Republican counterparts for upholding a lie that arguably fueled the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. Atlanta Democrat Sen. Nan Orrock chastised Republicans on the floor Tuesday.

“The big lie got told here, for a good six months, running up to the presidential election,” she said. “The big lie got told from the White House and it spread out through the echo chamber of the right wing.”

‘Perception goes both ways’

Throughout the multiple committee hearings held on proposed elections measures, GOP lawmakers cited the need for a boost in “public confidence” as the justification for the measures, which in most cases, would add obstacles to voting in Georgia. At the same time, many admit reactions from their Republican constituents are likely based on emotion and not fact.

“I have never received the number of constituent contacts — phone calls, emails, letters — on any subject matter like I have after the election this fall,” Athens Republican Sen. Bill Cowsert said on the floor Tuesday. “There’s really a crisis in confidence in the public on the validity and integrity of the election returns. Now a lot of it might just be sour grapes, people unhappy that they lost.”

Widespread voter fraud wasn’t found, Hartwell Republican Rep. Allan Powell conceded during a meeting of the Special Committee on Election Integrity.

“It wasn’t found,” he said. “It’s just in a lot of people’s minds that there was.”

But the same justification is used for proposed bills that are much more restrictive than the laws on the books today. The omnibus Senate Bill 241 would in particular restrict who is allowed to vote by mail — although GOP senators indicated Thursday they may walk back on the provision that does away with no-excuse absentee voting.

Dr. Andra Gillespie, professor of political science at Emory University, said legislating based on public perception is not uncommon as “perception is a lot of politics.”

“I think the question here is that the perception is premised off of a lie — a propagandist lie. Republican legislators, Gov. (Brian) Kemp, Secretary Raffensperger have all felt pressure to try to address the concerns of citizens who were told by President Trump, that there was widespread election fraud,” she said. “So we can’t escape the fact that the lie had traction. But the normative question that comes from this is: do we start to reshape public policy on the basis of false information?”

A report released earlier this month from the Brennan Center for Justice — a nonpartisan law and policy institute — found that following the 2020 election and “grounded in a rash of baseless and racist allegations of voter fraud and election irregularities,” legislators across the country have introduced more than four times the number of measures that would restrict voter access than this time last year.

As of Feb. 19, an update says, state lawmakers have carried over, prefiled or introduced 253 bills with provisions that restrict voting access.

“It’s not about disenfranchising voters, it’s not about overburdening the electorate,” Perry Republican Sen. Larry Walker said. He introduced legislation to add ID requirements when requesting an absentee ballot. “It is about efficiency and security and election integrity and allowing the Georgia public to have confidence in the vote.”

While many GOP lawmakers have admitted there wasn’t widespread fraud, others continue perpetuating that any instances of fraud — no matter how small — are justifiable basis for voting changes.

Milledgeville Republican Rep. Rick Williams said last week that “any fraud — any absentee ballot fraud — is too much.”

“We all want the same thing at the end of the day: that the elections are fair, honest, that everyone votes their conscience and no one is manipulated, threatened,” he said. “No votes are bought with a five-dollar bill or a cigarette and a can of beer.”

Gillespie said lawmakers should be careful because “perception goes both ways.”

“If you are creating policy solutions in search of a problem, or you’re making policy solutions that helps you continue to advance a perpetuated lie, or you continue to advance changes that look like they may disproportionately affect voters in the other party, right after you lost an election, perception goes both ways,” she said. “Republican voters perceive voter fraud, even though it wasn’t there and we can improve that empirically, then I have to take Democratic perceptions, seriously as well that this … looks like gamesmanship.”

Democrats, voting rights advocates prepare for a fight

Voting rights advocates are up in arms that many of the proposed bills would put additional time and cost burdens on already strained county elections offices and disproportionately impact minority voters.

The omnibus election bill on the House side, House Bill 531, targets early in-person voting on Sundays — a day historically used by faith leaders in the Black community to mobilize their congregations to vote. Bishop Reginald Jackson who presides over an A.M.E. Church in Atlanta called the legislation both “troubling” and “insulting.”

“The Black church has always been engaged in trying to get our people to vote. So we use ‘Souls to the Polls’ as a means particularly to get our seniors and other members of our congregations to gather for worship and following worship to go to the polls to cast our ballot,” Jackson said. “Again, House Bill 531, this is nothing more than another attempt to suppress the Black vote.”

The November general election and Jan. 5 runoffs saw historic turnout — particularly among minority voters. Black vote mobilizers have been praised for their decade-long effort to mobilize voters in Georgia.

Democrat Sen. David Lucas of Macon was in tears in front of his colleagues at the lectern Tuesday. Lucas has been in the legislature since 1975 and was one of the first Black senators elected after Reconstruction. The Democrat swore his party would fight the voting changes that seem to take Georgia back in time, not forward.

“I will not go back home and tell those folks who voted, that I took away the right for you to vote,” he said. “And that’s what this bill is about. Every last one of these election bills is about. The election didn’t turn out the way you wanted and you want to perpetuate the lie that Trump told.”

Another proposal limits drop-boxes — which were promoted by voting mobilizers and state officials to curb the risk of absentee ballots not returning in time — would do away with the opportunity for low-income voters to cast their ballot without paying for a stamp, Gillespie said. If additional photo ID requirements are approved by lawmakers, not all Georgians have access to technology to do so.

“You are making it harder for people to be able to cast the ballot,” she said. “And it is not far fetched to assume that they’re going to be some people who will drop out of the electorate as a result of these extra requirements — and it’s being done in response to a falsehood.”

Nse Ufot, director of the New Georgia Project, a voter mobilization group founded by Stacey Abrams, called the flood of bills introduced by GOP lawmakers “unpatriotic” and a “direct backlash” from the outcomes of the 2020 elections.

“The problem is that we don’t have, right now, a legislative path to stop it,” she told CNHI. “So we’re taking it to the court of public opinion and we are preparing for actual litigation.”