Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

Voting rights suits cause budget pain in Georgia, attorney general laments

Stacey Abrams and Brian Kemp

Lawsuits brought by Stacey Abrams, among others, have forced Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp to adjust his budget to providing more funding for the state's legal defense team. Kemp defeated Abrams in 2018.

Pool/Getty Images

Defending against a growing wave of voter suppression lawsuits is starting to put a real pinch on Georgia's budget, the state's top attorney says.

More taxpayer money to hire more lawyers will be needed soon, especially because additional voting rights litigation is anticipated in coming weeks, Attorney General Chris Carr on Monday told fellow Republicans who control the purse strings at the state capital.

The rules governing the state's elections have been set or maintained by the Republicans who have held all levers of power for the past 15 years in the Deep South's most populous state. But since Democrat Stacey Abrams came within a whisper of getting elected the nation's first black female governor in 2018, and blamed restrictive policies for preventing thousands of her supporters from casting ballots, Georgia has become the marquee venue for voting rights challenges nationwide.


"We are currently maximizing our internal capacity with elections lawsuits against the state," Carr told a state House appropriations panel, "and there are more lawsuits coming our way this year and in the future."

GOP Gov. Brian Kemp's budget is asking to take almost $400,000 from the office of the secretary of state, which runs elections, and give it to the attorney general for "legal services to support election security." More than that will ultimately be needed, Carr said, because "the fiscal impact that this litigation will have on the state in the coming months and years is significant."

His office has assigned two staff attorneys to work full time defending election lawsuits and five others to help on top of their traditional workloads. But the attorney said hiring private firms for parts of the cases would be required — and at a time when Kemp is working to persuade the General Assembly to cut state spending 4 percent this year and another 6 percent next year.

Abrams and the advocacy group she founded after losing the governor's race, Fair Fight Action, have brought a comprehensive federal lawsuit saying Georgia's system amounts to an unconstitutional series of obstacles that are disproportionately likely to disadvantage African-Americans. It's focused on getting the courts to strike down the state's policies for purging voter rolls, delaying the processing of registration applications, short-staffing polling places in urban and rural precincts, and requiring exact documentation matches (down to the middle initial) for people seeking to cast absentee and provisional ballots.

National Democratic campaign organizations, meanwhile, have challenged the state's high rate of rejection of absentee ballots and its rule assuring the names of Republican candidates always appear first on the ballot.

"Unfortunately, we have to spend a tremendous amount of time and energy dealing with ongoing litigation," GOP Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger testified at another budget hearing.

In addition to mounting defenses in those cases, the state's legal bills also include paying for storage. That's because last year a federal judge ordered Georgia to hang on indefinitely to all the voting equipment that's been used in elections under dispute, although almost all of it has been replaced by more modern technology for 2020. The storage bill alone is about $400,000 a year.

The odds that the state's legal bills will eventually abate are small. Demographic shifts mean Georgia's politics will eventually become increasingly purple — and Democrats are eager to hasten that switch. They are vowing to compete aggressively, and expensively, not only for the state's 16 electoral votes this year but also for both Senate seats. But their chances of upsets are reliant on big turnout from the black communities who maintain their balloting is subject to unfair regulation.

Read More

Is Bombing Iran Deja Vu All Over Again?

The B-2 "Spirit" Stealth Bomber flys over the 136th Rose Parade Presented By Honda on Jan. 1, 2025, in Pasadena, California. (Jerod Harris/Getty Images/TNS)

Jerod Harris/Getty Images/TNS)

Is Bombing Iran Deja Vu All Over Again?

After a short and successful war with Iraq, President George H.W. Bush claimed in 1991 that “the ghosts of Vietnam have been laid to rest beneath the sands of the Arabian desert.” Bush was referring to what was commonly called the “Vietnam syndrome.” The idea was that the Vietnam War had so scarred the American psyche that we forever lost confidence in American power.

The elder President Bush was partially right. The first Iraq war was certainly popular. And his successor, President Clinton, used American power — in the former Yugoslavia and elsewhere — with the general approval of the media and the public.

Keep ReadingShow less
Conspiratorial Thinking Isn’t Growing–Its Consequences Are
a close up of a typewriter with the word conspiracy on it

Conspiratorial Thinking Isn’t Growing–Its Consequences Are

The Comet Ping Pong Pizzagate shooting, the plot to kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer, and a man’s livestreamed beheading of his father last year were all fueled by conspiracy theories. But while the headlines suggest that conspiratorial thinking is on the rise, this is not the case. Research points to no increase in conspiratorial thinking. Still, to a more dangerous reality: the conspiracies taking hold and being amplified by political ideologues are increasingly correlated with violence against particular groups. Fortunately, promising new research points to actions we can take to reduce conspiratorial thinking in communities across the US.

Some journalists claim that this is “a golden age of conspiracy theories,” and the public agrees. As of 2022, 59% of Americans think that people are more likely to believe in conspiracy theories today than 25 years ago, and 73% of Americans think conspiracy theories are “out of control.” Most blame this perceived increase on the role of social media and the internet.

Keep ReadingShow less
We Can Save Our Earth: Environment Opportunities 2025
a group of windmills in the sky above the clouds

We Can Save Our Earth: Environment Opportunities 2025

On May 8th, 2025, the Network for Responsible Public Policy (NFRPP) convened a session to discuss the future of the transition to clean energy in the face of some stiff headwinds caused by the new US administration led by Donald Trump. The panel included Dale Bryk, Director of State and Regional Policy at the Harvard Environmental and Energy Law Program and a Senior Fellow at the Regional Plan Association, and Dan Sosland, President of the Acadia Center. The discussion was moderated by Richard Eidlin, National Policy Director for Business for America.

 
 


Keep ReadingShow less