Elections In Georgia (U.S. State)

Elections in Georgia are held to fill various state and federal seats. Regular elections are held every even year. The positions being decided each year varies, as the terms of office varies. The State Senate, State House and U.S. House will typically be up for election, as all of those positions have two-year terms. Special elections are held to fill vacated offices. Georgia is one of seven states that require a run-off election if no candidate receives a majority of the vote in a primary election and the only state that requires a run-off election for state and congressional offices if no candidate wins a majority of the vote in a general election; Louisiana has a similar requirement, but it operates under a different election system.

In a 2018 ranking of U.S. states by perceived electoral integrity (PEI), Georgia ranked 51st among all U.S. states and District of Columbia. While all other states' perceived electoral integrity was valued at very high, high or moderate, Georgia was the only state in the rankings to be designated as a state with low perceived electoral integrity. It scored 49 out of 100 in the 2018 PEI index, getting lowest marks in voting boundaries (18 out of 100) and the highest in Party and candidate registration (67 out of 100). In the 2020 PEI index, Georgia's score had risen from 49 to 74.

A 2020 study ranked Georgia as the second most difficult state for citizens to vote in, primarily for a reduction of polling stations by 50 percent or more since 2012 in parts of the state.

History

Following the end of martial law and readmission to the Union during Reconstruction, Georgia was overwhelmingly dominated by the Democratic Party for a hundred years, as were many other states of the Confederacy. White voters often perceived the Republican Party as the party of the North standing for Yankee values, growing industrialisation, and an excessively powerful and interfering federal government, all arrayed against their localized agricultural society. The abolition of slavery by amendment to the U.S. Constitution and the legacy of an economy damaged by war and social upheaval led many to bitterly oppose a wide variety of national policies.

Elections to the U.S. Congress during this period saw almost exclusively Democratic senators and either totally or almost-totally Democratic House rule. From 1872 to 2002, Georgia voters consistently elected Democrats as governor and Democratic majorities to the state legislature. Like many other Southern states, the Democratic-controlled legislature established run-off elections for primaries in which no candidate receives more than 50% of the vote. In addition, the Democratic primaries were further defined by their usage of the white primary to exclude African Americans and other ethnicities from participation, as well as the usage of the county unit system from 1898 to 1963 to allocate votes to winners along rural-biased lines.

Historically, elections at all levels of government in the U.S. state of Georgia were dominated by conservative white Democrats in the period between Reconstruction and the end of the New Deal Coalition. For decades, Republicans were a tiny minority, generally associated with Union military victory at the end of the Civil War. Indeed, for several years, the Republicans did not even field a candidate for governor or any other statewide elected office.

Beginning in the 1950s, the credible enforcement of new laws inspired by the Civil Rights Movement began to steadily erode the preponderance of Democrats in elective office in Georgia. The repeal of Jim Crow laws allowed previously disenfranchised African Americans to vote in elections and be active in politics. As many of these people joined with some white Democrats to work for more immediate liberal and pluralistic policies, a growing number of conservative white Democrats who supported either gradual change or none at all either began splitting their tickets at the national level or switching outright to the GOP. The strong showing in Georgia by Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower in the 1956 presidential race proved to be a turning point. Georgia would remain competitive at the national level for most of the rest of the 20th century. the Republican Party appeared positioned to gain even more ground in the coming years. The Democratic Party did not carry the state from the 1960 election until Jimmy Carter ran for the White House 16 years later.

Modern times and the shift to Republican control

Beginning with Barry Goldwater's presidential bid in 1964, the Republican Party began making inroads in Georgia. The state swung over dramatically to support Goldwater—the first time it had gone Republican in a presidential election in American history. In time, the Republican Party of Georgia would field competitive candidates and win races for seats in the U.S. Senate and U.S. House of Representatives. Republicans also began making gains at the state level, mostly in the Atlanta suburbs. However, conservative Democrats continued to hold most offices at the local level well into the 1990s.

In presidential races, Georgia has given its electoral college votes to the Republican candidate all but five times since 1964: in 1968, segregationist George Wallace won a plurality of Georgia's votes on the American Independent Party ticket; former Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter won his home state by landslide margins in 1976 and 1980 (sweeping every county in the state in 1976); then-Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton won a plurality of votes in 1992 against incumbent Republican George H. W. Bush and Independent Ross Perot; and former Delaware Senator and Vice-President Joe Biden won a plurality of votes in 2020 against incumbent Republican Donald Trump. Republican George W. Bush won Georgia by double digits in 2000 and 2004, with 54.67% and 57.97%, respectively, of the vote, making him the only Republican presidential candidate to carry Georgia twice. In 2008, John McCain won the state by a narrower margin of only 5 points, winning 52% to Democrat Barack Obama's 47%. In 2012, Mitt Romney won the state with 53% to Obama's 45%. In 2016, Donald Trump won the state with 51% to Hillary Clinton's 46%.

By 2007, conservative Republicans had become the dominant force in state elections, with Republicans holding the offices of governor and lieutenant governor and significant majorities in both houses of the state General Assembly.

As in many states, Democratic strongholds in Georgia include urban and minority-dominated areas. Democrats typically fare well in cities such as Atlanta (and its suburbs such as Gwinnett County), Macon, and Columbus, which have large minority populations, as well as Athens, home of the University of Georgia. The Republican Party dominates state elections through its hold on rural south Georgia, with a very notable exception in the southwestern part of the state; the Appalachian north; and many of Atlanta's further suburbs and exurbs. Former Speaker of the United States House of Representatives Newt Gingrich, co-author of the Contract with America and architect of the 1994 "Republican Revolution," represented a district in Cobb County, a suburban Atlanta county which has since flipped to supporting Democratic candidates since 2016.

A feature of Georgia elections is the requirement for 50%-plus-one majorities in general and primary elections, triggering runoff elections if no candidate receives a majority. From 1898 to 1962, the Democratic Party used a combination of the white primary and the county unit system to ensure that only white rural voters' preferences were reflected in the de facto election of political offices across the state, although the white primary was abolished in the federal case '' King v. Chapman'' (1945). After the county unit system was struck down by the Supreme Court case '' Gray v. Sanders'' (accompanied by the election of Carl Sanders, who became the first Democrat to be nominated for governor by popular vote since the establishment of the county unit system), the General Assembly passed a bill to switch future Georgia elections to runoff voting. The bill was introduced and sponsored by Macon legislator Denmark Groover, who proposed that runoff voting "would again provide protection which … was removed with the death of the county unit system" and warned that " have got to go the majority vote because all we have to have is a plurality and the Negroes and the pressure groups and special interests are going to manipulate this State and take charge."

However, the following ascendance of the Republican Party culminated in the 1992 defeat of incumbent Wyche Fowler by Republican Paul Coverdell by runoff, despite Fowler leading the first round by a plurality. This led the Georgia Legislature, then controlled by Democrats, to change the state's laws requiring a run-off election only if the winning candidate received less than 45% of the vote. In the 1996 Senate election, the winner, Democrat Max Cleland won with only 48.9% (1.4% ahead of Republican Guy Millner) thus avoiding a run-off. In 2005 after Republicans took control of the legislature, the run-off requirement was changed back to 50%, in the same bill which implemented a requirement for Voter ID.

Current status

The current Governor of Georgia is Brian Kemp, who was elected as a Republican in 2018. The Lieutenant Governor is Burt Jones. Other elected state executive officials include Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, Attorney General Chris Carr, Commissioner of Insurance Jim Beck, and Superintendent of Schools Richard Woods.

The Georgia General Assembly has been controlled by the Republicans since 2004. They have majorities over the Democrats in both the Senate and House of Representatives by margins of 33 to 23 and 101 to 78 respectively as of 2023. In congressional elections. The state also sends 14 members to the U.S. House of Representatives.

In 2020, Democrats won both Senate seats and the 2020 Presidential election. The state voted for Joe Biden for president‚ and senators Jon Ossoff, the state's first Jewish senator, and Raphael Warnock, the state's first Black senator. The win was due in part to the increased turnout in African-American voters due to the work of Stacey Abrams and LaTosha Brown. In 2024, Donald Trump flipped Georgia back into the Republican column winning it by 2.2%.

Election rules

In-person voting

In Louisville, Georgia, in October 2018, Black senior citizens were told to get off a bus that was to have taken them to a polling place for early voting. The bus trip was supposed to have been part of the "South Rising" bus tour sponsored by the advocacy group Black Voters Matter. A clerk of the local Jefferson County Commission allegedly called the intended voters' senior center to claim that the bus tour constituted "political activity," which is barred at events sponsored by the county. LaTosha Brown, one of the founders of Black Voters Matter, described the trip's prevention as a clear-cut case of "...voter intimidation. This is voter suppression, Southern style." The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund sent a letter to the county calling for an "immediate investigation" into the incident, which it condemned as, "an unacceptable act of voter intimidation," that "potentially violates several laws."

Georgia made efforts to correct voting problems that had occurred in the 2018 election. In the 2020 statewide primary, however, many irregularities were reported, including missing machines at polling places and mail-in ballots that never arrived at voters' houses.

Voter ID

Since 2006, only public university and college students can use their student ID to vote.

Voter roll management

Georgia's Secretary of State, Brian Kemp, the Republican gubernatorial nominee, was the official in charge of determining whether or not voters were allowed to vote in the November 2018 election and has been accused of voter suppression. Minority voters are statistically more likely to have names that contain hyphens, suffixes or other punctuation that can make it more difficult to match their name in databases, experts noted, and are more likely to have their voter applications suspended by Kemp's office. Barry C. Burden, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and director of its Elections Research Center said, "An unrealistic rule of this sort will falsely flag many legitimate registration forms. Moreover, the evidence indicates that minority residents are more likely to be flagged than are whites." Kemp has suspended the applications of 53,000 voters, a majority of whom are minorities. Strict voter registration deadlines in Georgia prevented 87,000 Georgians from voting because they had registered after the deadline. "Even if everyone who is on a pending list is eventually allowed to vote, it places more hurdles in the way of those voters on the list, who are disproportionately black and Hispanic," said professor Charles Stewart III in 2018.

Georgia has a law prohibiting felons on probation for crimes involving moral turpitude from voting or registering to vote, with a similar law in Alabama having been criticized by the United States Supreme Court in 471 U.S. 222 (1985) as having roots in white supremacy.

The ACLU of Georgia released a report in 2020 arguing that 200,000 voters were unlawfully removed from voter rolls, which accounted for 63.3% of all voters who were removed.

After 2020, the State Legislature allowed citizens to submit an unlimited number of challenges to people's voter registration. The mass challenges that followed have overwhelmed some election workers around Georgia who are forced to respond to every request even when many of the challenges to voters would have been removed anyway through standard list maintenance.

On July 29, 2024 the state added another way to cancel a voter's registration through an online portal, which has drawn criticism from groups like Fair Fight Action worried that it would be abused to unregister lawful voters. By August 5, cybersecurity researcher Jason Parker discovered a vulnerability in Georgia’s voter cancellation portal that allowed users to bypass the requirement for a driver’s license number, enabling the submission of voter registration cancellations with minimal, publicly available information. The discovery drew attention to weaknesses in the system and the importance of continued efforts to secure election infrastructure.

Election worker protections

As a result of lies about the reliability of the 2020 elections, election workers have faced threats to their safety which have required new measures to try and protect the civil servants. Some of the protections in Georgia include signs on the wall warning about suspicious packages, the requirement to wear gloves when opening the mail, new trainings by the Department of Homeland security on " spoofing" and "swatting", and trainings on deescalation tactics should a potentially violent election denier enter a polling place.

Election certification

In 2021, the State of Georgia changed the rules (Senate Bill 202) around who can serve on election boards to make it easier for the state to replace board members as a part of a Republican effort to take control of election administration nationwide.

In August 2024, the Georgia State Elections Board enacted two new rules that could deputize local election officials more discretion on whether they certify the election, contrary to state and national precedent. The Democratic party has filed a lawsuit to stop the new rules from taking effect, and it was blocked by a judge on October 16. According to a September 2024 ''New York Times'' newsletter, Georgia seems the most likely state to overturn election results on unfounded claims of fraud in 2024 due to recent changes in who oversees elections.

In September 2024, the Board of Elections made controversial rule changes including around hand-counting the number of ballots cast over the objections of most state election officials. The rule was blocked by a judge on October 15.

See also

* Political party strength in Georgia (U.S. state)
* United States presidential elections in Georgia
*Government of Georgia (U.S. state)
* Politics of Georgia (U.S. state)
* Women's suffrage in Georgia (U.S. state)
* 2020 Georgia state elections
*2024 Georgia state elections

Presidential elections

*2024 Presidential election
* 2020 Presidential election

Presidential primaries

* 2024 Democratic Primary
* 2024 Republican Primary

Election organizations

* New Georgia Project

References

External links

Elections
at the Georgia Secretary of State website
*
Georgia chapter
of the League of Women Voters
Voter ID rules
at VoteRiders

Archives

*

Materials related to Georgia elections
by Digital Public Library of America
*

{{Georgia (U.S. state)

Government of Georgia (U.S. state)
Political events in Georgia (U.S. state)