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Demonstrators stand outside the Georgia Capitol building to oppose voting restrictions.
Demonstrators stand outside the Georgia Capitol building to oppose voting restrictions.Credit…Megan Varner/Getty Images

After hours of intense and occasionally emotional debate, the Republican-controlled State Senate in Georgia voted 29-20 on Monday to approve a bill that would impose new voting restrictions in the state, including a repeal of no-excuse absentee voting.

Multiple Republican senators abstained from voting, signaling some unease with the strident nature of the voting restrictions and indicating that they could face an uphill battle in the weeks ahead. The Senate bill passed just one vote above the required 28-vote majority threshold.

The bill will now go to the State House of Representatives, which is also led by Republicans. Last week, the House passed its own omnibus bill of voting restrictions that included similar barriers to the ballot box, including limiting early voting times.

Though each chamber passed its own bill, some legislators in Georgia view the House legislation as the likely central vehicle for voting overhauls in the state. Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, has indicated that he generally supports “securing the vote,” repeating the Republican euphemism for imposing new voting laws in response to false claims of voter fraud following the 2020 election. Mr. Kemp, however, has not weighed in on many of the specific provisions in either bill.

Georgia has become one of the focal points of a national movement among Republicans to erect new barriers to voting in the wake of former President Donald J. Trump’s loss to President Biden in November. Mr. Biden narrowly won Georgia, as did the two Democratic Senate candidates in January.

At almost the same time that the Georgia Senate was passing its legislation on Monday, the governor of Iowa was signing new voting restrictions into law. The Iowa bill — passed on a party-line vote, with only Republicans voting in favor and only Democrats voting against — shortens both the early-voting period and Election Day voting hours.

During the hourslong debate in Georgia on Monday, Democrats rose repeatedly to denounce the Senate legislation, known as S.B. 241, as seeking to deny the right to vote to numerous groups, especially Black voters and other Georgians of color, and to erect new barriers to the ballot box simply in response to an election that Republicans in the state lost.

“We don’t have to continue this legacy of blocking access to the ballot,” said Nan Orrock, a state senator from Atlanta. “This is such a cloud over Georgia that these bills abound in our midst.”

Harold Jones II, the Democratic whip in the State Senate, noted the state’s history of laws aimed at suppressing Black voters, imploring his colleagues to listen to the protests and pleas from communities of color about the impact the new voting restrictions would have.

“As many of my colleagues come up, you would hear many of them, I’m sure, become emotional, and possibly their voice will crack, because that most basic right was denied to us,” Mr. Jones, who is Black, said. “It’s not 1800, it’s not 1850s. It is right here in this room. Many of the senators that sit here lived through that process. I see that every day with my parents. We live that. We understand how that most basic right was denied.”

Matt Brass, a Republican state senator who was removed as chairman of the redistricting committee by the Republican lieutenant governor after he backed efforts to overturn the election, rose in support of the bill, saying he was representing the Georgia voters who had lost confidence in elections.

“We still need the people of Georgia to believe in the process, and right now they are unconvinced,” Mr. Brass said.

But Senate Democrats pointed to the timing of the bill — following Republican losses in 2020 — as evidence that Republicans were not simply trying to address confidence in elections.

“The motivations are really suspect because it’s introduced immediately after voters of color dramatically increased their use of absentee voting this past year,” said Jen Jordan, a Democratic state senator from outside Atlanta.

Source Article from https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/03/09/us/biden-administration

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