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After passing a flurry of restrictive voting laws over the last year, Republican state lawmakers have a new item on their agenda: election police forces.
On March 9, Florida’s legislature approved the creation of such a unit, which would include an office of 25 staffers and cost about $2.5 million. Just a week later, on March 15, Georgia’s Republican-dominated House approved a similar but more vague measure that would allow the Georgia Bureau of Investigations (GBI), which has no expertise in voting or elections, to prosecute election crimes; that measure now heads to the state Senate. Such units would be among the first of their kind in the country.
Republicans, citing false claims of widespread voter fraud, say the proposals are necessary to secure elections by preventing voter fraud. But voting rights advocates say that’s disingenuous. Numerous studies, including one commissioned by the Trump Administration, have revealed infinitesimally few instances of real voter fraud nationwide; an AP investigation found fewer than 475 potential cases of fraud out of 25.5 million ballots cast in six states where Trump and his allies disputed results.
Instead, voting rights advocates say these laws are designed to reduce voter turnout, especially among racial and ethnic minorities, who tend to vote Democratic.
When Georgia voters hear that police will be investigating election issues, that will have a chilling effect, says Aklima Khondoker, chief legal officer at the New Georgia Project, which opposes the Georgia measure. “If you think you made a mistake, and now you’re going to be investigated by the GBI, that’s big and scary,” Khondoker says, adding that the GBI does not generally investigate election law. “They consider criminal matters almost exclusively,” she says.
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Source : time
