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Former felon Erica Racz registering to voting

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As Kemp starts reopening Georgia, suit seeks another primary delay

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp is trying to reopen businesses while a voting reform group is suing state election officials to delay the primary election again.

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Bill Theobald
By Bill TheobaldApr 21, 2020
Bill Theobald

Bill Theobald is senior writer at The Fulcrum, where he focuses on everything to do with voting. This December marks his 40th anniversary in the business, and he still believes -- now more than ever -- that the glow from great journalism can truly light the world.

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An election reform advocacy group has filed a lawsuit seeking another delay in Georgia's primary and changes in the way people vote because of the coronavirus epidemic.

The Coalition for Good Governance sued Monday in federal court, asking the primary be pushed back another three weeks, to June 30.

The suit was filed the same day Republican Gov. Brian Kemp announced he was allowing gyms, barber shops and many other businesses to reopen Friday. His aggressive plans to start reopening the state's economy went against the advice of health experts, who say the result could be a spike in potentially fatal Covid-19 cases in the coming month.

The primary now set for June 9 — with congressional, legislative, judicial and local government nominations at stake — originally was scheduled for March 24 and has already been delayed twice.

The Colorado-based coalition has been a strong advocate for using hand-marked paper ballots. It previously filed a suit alleging the new touchscreen computers being used in Georgia were so big and bright that people's privacy rights while voting would be violated. A judge rejected that argument.

The new suit argues that Georgia is headed to a repeat of the recent debacle in Wisconsin, where last-minute legal rulings left voters confused and forced thousands to risk their health in order to vote in person two weeks ago.

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The suit states that the touchscreen voting machines and the computer device used to check in voters are difficult and time-consuming to keep clean. It calls for using hand-marked paper ballots instead.

The lawsuit also calls for additional early voting and suggests that election officials are not prepared for the flood of absentee ballots that will be returned this election.

Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has sent absentee ballot request forms to Georgia's 6.9 million voters in an attempt to encourage people to avoid going to the polls.

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Make safe states matter

Richie is co-founder and senior advisor of FairVote.

It’s time for “safe state” voters to be more than nervous spectators and symbolic participants in presidential elections.

The latest poll averages confirm that the 2024 presidential election will again hinge on seven swing states. Just as in 2020, expect more than 95 percent of major party candidate campaign spending and events to focus on these states. Volunteers will travel there, rather than engage with their neighbors in states that will easily go to Donald Trump or Kamala Harris. The decisions of a few thousand swing state voters will dwarf the importance of those of tens of millions of safe-state Americans.

But our swing-state myopia creates an opportunity. Deprived of the responsibility to influence which candidate will win, safe state voters can embrace the freedom to vote exactly the way they want, including for third-party and independent candidates.

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The National EduDemocracy Landscape Map provides a comprehensive overview of where states are approaching democracy reforms within education.

The democracy movement ignores education races at its peril

Dr. Mascareñaz is a leader in the Cornerstone Project, a co-founder of The Open System Institute and chair of the Colorado Community College System State Board.

One of my clearest, earliest memories of talking about politics with my grandfather, who helped the IRS build its earliest computer systems in the 1960s, was asking him how he was voting. He said, “Everyone wants to make it about up here,” he said as gestured high above his head before pointing to the ground. “But the truth is that it’s all down here.” This was Thomas Mascareñaz’s version of “all politics is local” and, to me, essential guidance for a life of community building.

As a leader in The Cornerstone Project and a co-founder of The Open System Institute I've spent lots of time thinking and working at the intersections of education and civic engagement. I've seen firsthand how the democratic process unfolds at all levels — national, statewide, municipal and, crucially, in our schools. It is from this vantage point that I can say, without a shadow of a doubt, that the democracy reform movement will not succeed unless it acts decisively in the field of education.

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Vice President Kamala Harris closes out the Democratic National Convention on Thursday night.

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The Democrats didn't have a meaningful primary, and no one cared

Lovit is a senior program officer and historian at the Charles F. Kettering Foundation, where he also hosts the podcast"The Context.”

In many respects, last week’s Democratic National Convention was indeed conventional. The party faithful gathered in a basketball arena in Chicago for speeches carefully calibrated to unite factions and define the central messages of the Harris-Walz campaign. It was a ceremony, a celebration and a storyline — just like the Republicans’ convention last month, and many conventions in years past.

For most of American history, party conventions served a different purpose. They were practical meetings where elites hammered out details of the party platform and wrangled over potential nominees. In a political world where party tickets at every level of government were determined in smoke-filled rooms, the convention was the biggest smoke-filled room of them all.

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A framework for democracy philanthropy

Stid is the executive director of Lyceum Labs, a fiscally sponsored project of the Defending Democracy Together Institute. The following is reposted with permission from his blog, The Art of Association.

It is challenging for philanthropic funders to get started and stay focused when it comes to strengthening democracy. The vagaries of our political system — really a complex system of systems cast on a continental scale — make it hard to know where to even begin. There are dozens of solutions that could be worthy of support. Alas, none are backed by dispositive evidence indicating that they are the single-best way forward. Then, every second and fourth year, elections reset the stage of democracy and reshuffle the cast of characters, often in unsettling ways.

Democracy's proximity to politics further complicates the philanthropic picture. The tax code bars foundations from backing or opposing candidates, parties and ballot measures. Many foundations take a belt-and-suspenders approach to this proscription on electioneering by avoiding anything that smacks of politics (as democracy-related causes frequently do). Other foundations, in contrast, push right up to the edge, seeking to exploit all the legal ways they can underwrite voter registration, education and participation, ostensibly on a nonpartisan basis, to further their political goals.

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Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft, who oversees elections, is running for governor this year.

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We can break the partisan cycle by unrigging the system

Sturner, the author of “Fairness Matters,” is the managing partner of Entourage Effect Capital.

This is the sixth entry in the “Fairness Matters” series, examining structural problems with the current political systems, critical policies issues that are going unaddressed and the state of the 2024 election.

We face complex issues, from immigration to the national debt, from Social Security to education, from gun violence to climate change and the culture war, from foreign policy to restoring a vibrant middle class by ensuring economic outcomes are more balanced and equitable.

Yet, neither party seems to be doing much about any of the political problems and policy challenges plaguing our nation. Instead of working on real solutions, our politicians spend their time and our national resources distracting and dividing us by using every tool at their disposal to retain power. Why is that? As Andrew Yang points out in a recent TED Talk (quoting a senator), “A problem is now worth more to us unaddressed than addressed.” It’s galling until you remember that the Democratic and Republican parties are private, gain-seeking organizations that exist to seek and retain power. As such, we should be wary of political parties because our interests and theirs are not aligned.

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