Legislative Session Week 12
Election law overhaul passes in the final hours of the 2024 session
April 1, 2024
The 2024 session came to a close last week. Sine Die!
Democrats, allies, and advocates held our breath as the clock counted down to midnight. Many pieces of odious legislation hung over our heads, including bills targeting trans youth, the so-called Georgia Religious Freedom Restoration Act (which would have allowed individuals to ignore anti-discrimination laws under the guise of religious freedom), and a bill that would have allowed for a monument to Clarence Thomas at the Capitol. In the end, these bills didn’t make it to the floor for a vote.
As a reminder of our posture, with Democrats in the minority in the House and Senate, we don’t have the votes to stop legislation we don’t agree with.
There seemed to be much conflict between Republicans in the House and Senate who must coordinate to get bills passed. So while that meant some of the bills we were most against never made it to a vote, it also meant positive legislation didn’t make it either.
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I will send a recap of the entire session in a few days, but for now let’s talk about the final week of the 2024 session.
In this Issue:
SB 189: Election Overhaul bill Passes at the Eleventh Hour, making Voter Challenges Easier.
SB 189: GOP Sneaks in Last Minute Ballot Access Change, Stacking the Deck in its Favor for November
DeKalb County Commission Special Election Update
Gun Safety Advocate Win! Line item to fund guns for teachers REMOVED from the Budget.
Good Legislation: More Time for New Moms and Dads
Good Legislation: Progress against Intolerable Rentals
A Word About Campaign Fundraising
SB 189: Election Overhaul Bill Passes at the Eleventh Hour. Makes Voter Challenges Easier, Among Other Things.
I’ve suspected that the GOP would bundle many of the bad election bills into one omnibus bill in the final days of session. They did exactly that last week. Senate Bill 189 passed on party lines within a few hours of its release in its final form. It was a quick turnaround, but I’ve been following these issues all session.
The new omnibus SB 189 is the biggest overhaul of election laws since Republicans rammed SB 202 through in 2021. Though it does multiple bad things, the most significant is it will pave the way for even more mass voter challenges, and make it more likely that meritless challenges are successful.
I spoke against the bill because it is bad for Georgia and bad for voters. I made the following points:
We already have processes in place to keep our voter rolls clean. Suggesting we don’t is giving credence to conspiracy theorists and election deniers.
Mass voter challenges are not a tool to clean our (already clean) voter rolls; rather, they are designed to inject chaos in the election process.
Bad actors are openly planning to use the mass challenge process to disrupt the 2024 election. Rather than doing the right thing and protecting our elections and democracy, Georgia GOP lawmakers are encouraging this behavior with the passage of SB 189.
See my full remarks here.
Third-party rightwing groups like a new company called EagleAI are already software to streamline the voter challenge process. With a few clicks of a mouse, any bad actor will be able to easily assemble and submit thousands of voter challenges in their county.
As I said in my remarks, SB 189 is like adding kerosene onto a fire.
We should have passed legislation to curb this bad behavior. Instead, the Georgia GOP invites it with open arms and continues to happily placate election deniers.
Their hollow excuses of “we need clean rolls' and “we need confidence in our elections” fall flat.
There has been a lot of coverage on this topic, if you’d like to read more.
SB 189: GOP Sneaks in Last Minute Ballot Access Change, Stacking Deck in its Favor for November
SB 189 also included a section designed to hurt President Biden’s chances in Georgia by making it easier for third-party candidates like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Cornel West to get on the ballot.
Under SB 189, a third party candidate can be on the Georgia Ballot if they are also on the ballot in at least 20 other states or territories; under current law, third party candidates have to collect 7,500 signatures on a petition to be on Georgia’s ballot.
Recall that Joe Biden won Georgia by less than 12,000 votes.
Adding third party candidates to the ballot are all part of the GOP’s strategy to shave off votes wherever they can. It’s death by a thousand cuts.
What’s really telling is how this provision was added onto the bill at the last possible moment. This language had never been introduced in any other bill and had not been vetted by the committee process. It was tacked on about an hour before the bill hit the House floor.
It’s cowardly to pass a bill you aren’t even willing to defend.
DeKalb County Commission Special Election Update
DeKalb voters got a win, but it won’t come in time.
More than 600,000 DeKalb residents are down a commissioner ever since two commissioners resigned in early March. The DeKalb Election office said that due to legal requirements, it couldn’t hold the special elections to fill the vacancies until November. But that will leave DeKalb residents under-represented or without representation on the Board of Commissioners for the rest of this year!
I worked to clear up the legal impediments so that DeKalb could fill the vacancies sooner– in May. Against all odds, the fix– the Democrat supported Draper Amendment–was included on a bill, and it passed both the House and the Senate on the last day of the legislative session.
But, as of the writing of this newsletter, the Governor has not yet signed the bill into law.
If the bill is not signed, the DeKalb Elections Board can’t move forward with holding the special election to fill the commissioner vacancies this May. With May just around the corner, we’ve run out of time to add additional races to the ballot.
But once the bill becomes law (assuming Kemp doesn’t veto it), we have prevented this from becoming an issue again, either here in DeKalb County, or any other county in our state.
And that’s something we should all be proud of.
DeKalb residents made democracy stronger across Georgia.
Gun Safety Advocate Win! Line item to fund guns for teachers REMOVED from the Budget.
The day before Sine Die, I became aware of the last minute addition of a $5 million line item to the budget. Although the line item was worded vaguely, it became apparent that the money was to fund the Lt. Governor’s dangerous idea to pay teachers $10,000 to keep a firearm in their classrooms.
It just so happened that on the same day, I joined dozens of gun safety advocates at First Iconium Baptist Church in District 90 for a press conference on the status of gun safety legislative efforts.
Here is an excerpt from my remarks relating to the Lt. Governor’s attempt to circumvent the regular budget process.
The broad coalition of advocates, doctors, survivors, parents, and pastors, all working toward a common purpose, was a sight to behold. I was honored to join BlackPush, Georgia Majority for Gun Safety, Tyme to Thrive, and many other coalition partners in the effort to keep our children safe.
We mobilized our members and called into the Capitol demanding that the Lt. Governor’s line item be removed.
The next day, Sine Die, not only had the line item been removed, but Chairman Hatchett, who oversees the budget on the House side, assured our chamber the remaining line items would NOT go toward paying teachers to arm themselves in the classroom.
A win for Georgians!
Good Legislation: More Time for New Moms and Dads
One of the votes from the final week that makes me proud is the one doubling the amount of time state workers can take off with pay within the first year of having a baby or adopting.
Assuming the Governor signs House Bill 1010, state workers will soon be allowed up to six weeks of paid parental leave.
That’s not nearly enough time but it’s far better than the three weeks state workers have had for years.
The federal Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 requires that new parents receive at least 12 weeks of unpaid leave. That’s unpaid so young parents who work for the state can at least count on an income for half that time. We’ll keep pushing for more.
The downside: HB 1010 does not apply to public school teachers.
So next session we need to offer the same benefit to our teachers and work on giving state employees more paid time off to settle in and get to know their new family members.
Good Legislation: Progress against Intolerable Rentals
Georgia has some of the nation’s worst tenant protections and it’s shameful the conditions some Georgians live in while paying most of their income for rent.
We sent a little help to low-income tenants this past week but there is still more to be done.
House Bill 404, which is now in the hands of the Governor, says rental properties should be “fit for human habitation.” While I voted for HB 404, I believe that’s a pretty low bar. Also, the bill doesn’t define the term “fit for human habitation,” which makes for a weak law.
The Safe at Home Act also would create a three-day grace period so tenants can catch up with their rent before landlords move to evict them. Finally, it places limits on security deposits to be equal to no more than two months’ rent.
We need to do much more to improve and expand low-income housing. But for this session, moving in the right direction was a win.
A Word About Campaign Fundraising
I’m going to give you a fair warning. For the next 7 weeks, I’m in campaign mode. The primary election is on May 21, and I have a challenger with money to spend.
While I try to keep my emails to you as substantive as possible (and promise to return to that after May – Don’t unsubscribe!), I wouldn’t be asking you for money if I didn’t need it. But now I have to ask, because winning re-election is the only way to keep doing this work. And a winning campaign requires resources.
If you made it this far into the Draper Paper, will you consider supporting my work?
If you donated in January, will you donate a little more now?
If everyone who received this email chipped in $25, I wouldn’t have to send out another fundraising email for all of 2024!
I’d be so grateful to have your support.
Yours in service,
