As the clock ticks down on Georgia’s 2024 legislative session, bills beefing up election integrity in the confidence-shaken swing state have met with success or stand a good chance at passage by Thursday’s final day of the session — Sine Die.
And a Peach State elections watchdog believes a package of transparency and ballot security provisions likely to pass would be huge election integrity wins.
‘A Bit Testy’
The Republican-controlled Georgia Senate, working deep into Tuesday evening, passed House bills 974 and 1207. The former requires that ballots in optical scan voting systems use a visible watermark security feature, according to HB 974’s text. It also calls for the secretary of state’s office to post ballot images online and expands the number of elections subject to risk-limiting, post-election audits. HB 974 enjoyed wide bipartisan support in the Georgia House of Representatives and the Senate.
House Bill 1207 requires Georgia elections workers to be U.S. citizens, and it includes poll watcher, as well as poll worker, protections. Garland Favorito, co-founder of the nonpartisan, nonprofit VoterGA, said election integrity advocates pushed back on the hyperbolic narrative peddled by the left and corporate media that poll workers are under constant assault.
“We flipped it around on them on the language and put protections for poll watchers equal to this for poll workers,” Favorito told The Federalist late Tuesday.
Senate Ethics Committee Chairman Max Burns, a Republican, told his colleagues that while election bills are known to “get a bit testy,” HB 1207 is
