Speaker of the Georgia House of Representatives David Ralston (R) is not happy about a plan by fellow Republican and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to permit all voting to occur by mail:
Georgia state House Speaker David Ralston (R) is coming out against a recent effort taken by Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) to mail absentee ballot request forms to all voters in the state amid the coronavirus pandemic, saying the move could be “devastating” for Republican candidates. …
Ralston said one of his main problems with the mass-scale voting effort were the possibility of fraud. He also pointed to concerns he thinks voters may have about “breaches of security systems and data systems.” [The Hill]
Sure. But that’s a problem for both parties, and needs to be resolved by the Secretary of State’s office. Especially in view of this incoherent comment:
“So, here, you know, the process keeps going up and up and up and so a multitude of reasons why vote by mail in my view is not acceptable,” Ralston went on, before adding “the president said it best, this will be extremely devastating to Republicans and conservatives in Georgia.”
And neither the President nor Ralston provides any detail on why that should be true, and why it should be part of the debate. If they can find a way to prove that such voting disadvantages Republican voters, they might have something, but so far I haven’t seen anything and nothing comes to my mind in support of it, either.
However, I have a smidgeon of sympathy for this:
At an earlier point in the interview, when discussing the vote-by-mail effort in Georgia, Ralston said he thinks that it should instead be in the “purview of the legislative branch where members of the state House and state Senate” to “consider and debate and discuss and vet these things and then decide if that’s going to be the policy of this state.”
“But to simply have this become an administrative decision made apparently on the fly during this crisis, to me, is just a — is very, very unwise and it’s poor policy,” he added.
I think a debate to decide if it’s a legislative issue or not would be appropriate. I’d like to hear Raffensperger’s response, too, because while to Ralston this may seem like a panic reaction, to me it looks like the Secretary of State looked at the situation and decided that there was no way to ensure the safety of voters using physical facilities, but mail remains safe.
Perhaps Raffensperger just needs to present the safeguards they’ve implemented to Ralston.
Or perhaps Ralston is thinking of how Republicans will lose control of those physical voting facilities.
But they’ll still have the mail-in ballot facilities to control. I’m not sure how I feel about this, now that I’ve sort of thought it through. Are there adequate safeguards on mail-in voting? There’s usually very little actual voting fraud, year after year, but it’s harder to measure vote suppression. Perhaps this is nothing to worry about. Maybe this even gets around vote suppression.
