Peach Tree Times

Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, along with election officials, are seeking for the General Assembly to reform the no-excuse absentee ballot request rule.

Currently, the state requires county election officials to hold three weeks of in-person early voting and no-excuse absentee ballot voting, which is hard on county resources and budgets, a news release from Raffensperger's office states. 

“In light of the past few months and the overwhelming amount of paper absentee ballots that have been requested, processed and counted, I would support legislation that would require all applicants to provide a reason to receive an absentee ballot by mail,” Paulding County Elections and Registration Supervisor Deidre Holden said in the news release. “It would also help with the expense on a county budget due to the extreme cost incurred in the processing of a ballot from beginning to end.”

Lowndes County Elections Director Deb Cox said in the news release that reforming the absentee ballot request process would help her county if it made it so that only those with a specific need could help the process.

“Asking county elections officials to hold no excuse absentee ballot voting in addition to three weeks of early, in-person voting, and election day voting is too much to manage,” Raffensperger said in the news release. “The way Georgia’s election system is set up under law, county elections officials are essentially required to run three elections simultaneously, one each for a population that wants to vote a different way."

Since 2005, absentee voters have not needed a reason for voting absentee. Until the pandemic, only between 5 and 7 percent of voters utilized absentee voting, meaning less than 300,0000 ballots, which was manageable. However, the pandemic has caused that to change.

"Until COVID-19, absentee ballot voters were mostly those who needed to cast absentee ballots," Raffensperger said in the news release. "For the sake of our resource stretched and overwhelmed elections officials, we need to reform our absentee ballot system.”