ATLANTA, GA – NOVEMBER 02: An election worker processed absentee ballots at State Farm Arena on November 2, 2020 in Atlanta, Georgia. (Photo by Megan Varner/Getty Images)
OAN Newsroom
UPDATED 9:15 AM PT – Saturday, March 20, 2021
GOP lawmakers in Georgia are proposing legislation to reform how money is thrown around in Georgia’s elections. One part of this proposal is to eliminate the influence from nonpartisan organizations who can spend extra large sums of cash to influence election outcomes.
In the 2020 elections, two nonpartisan groups, the Center for Voter Information and the Voter Participation Center, both sent out millions of absentee ballot request forms to Georgia voters. These request forms had the voters names and personal information already filled out, so all those voters had to do was sign their name.
The two groups focused on only sending ballot request forms to people of color, unmarried women and young people.
“Unmarried women, people of color, and young people,” former Voter Participation CEO Jessica Barber Brown said. “This is a group of people that move 42 percent more.”
Even though the groups are nonpartisan, when they weren’t selectively sending out ballots, they also donated large sums of money to Democrats.
According to OpenSecrets, a campaign finance tracker, the groups donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to Democrats in the 2020 elections and not a single penny to Republicans. These groups almost certainly played a role in Democrats taking Georgia in 2020.
As a result, Republican lawmakers want to make sure so-called “nonpartisan” groups don’t try and rig elections in favor of Democrats.
If the new proposal goes into effect, campaigns and political candidates will have to actually excite Georgians to get out and vote based on their policy. This, instead of nonprofits simply filling out absentee ballot request forms for people they think will vote Democrat.
