May 30 Did you know?

• One voter in Forsyth, Marc Morris, a former state representative for Forsyth, challenged 5,000 voters before the 2021 Senate runoffs. This was the beginning of mass voter challenges across Georgia.
  
• In Georgia, mail in voting must be received by 7 PM on the official election day and must be tabulated and reported to the Secretary of State by 8:00 pm.  The law that created this extreme deadline passed the Georgia legislature this year.  Previously, Elections offices had until 11:59PM.
  
• Absentee Ballots: Remember that the Absentee Ballot application requires 3 dates: today’s date, the election date and your birthday. Be sure to get the correct dates in the correct places.  If they are not correct, the request will not be filled. Forsyth County elections office tries to contact the voters, but it is better for everyone to get it right the first time.
  
• With the recent passage of 3 new voter suppression bills, Georgia drastically changed how elections are run ahead of the 2024 Elections. S.B. 189 makes it  easier to invalidate a voter’s eligibility by not placing any limits on which factors can be used to make a valid challenge and it allows voters to be removed from the rolls up until 45 days before an election, a violation of the National Voter Registration Act.. H.B. 974, allows for all ballots, not just a voter’s own individual ballot, to be available for the public to access via the Georgia Secretary of State’s website. It is part of a troubling trend in Republican states to conduct citizen-led audits, inspired by the chaos and disinformation spread in the 2020 election. Finally, H.B.1207 among other things, reduces the number of election machines per voters at every polling location, with one machine per every 250 voters. 
  
• Until 2013, a state, like Georgia, with a history of racial discrimination would not have been able to make changes to its voting laws without federal approval, due to provisions of the Voting Rights Act. With its decision in Shelby County vs. Holder, the Supreme Court removed the need for federal approval and ushered in an era of states being able to restrict voting access without advance legal clearance. (See graphic above for the states that have done this.)