On January 29, two activists locked themselves to construction equipment belonging to the main “Cop City” contractor, shutting down the work site in downtown Atlanta for hours. “Myself and countless other residents have tried every legal avenue to Stop Cop City—but the City government has stonewalled us every step of the way,” an activist called Temperance said in a press statement. “I don’t want to have to be doing this today, but direct action and civil disobedience are the only options we have left.” Both activists were arrested and jailed.

In a way, the movement was returning to its roots. In 2021, the fight to stop Cop City began with direct action. After two years of protest, organizers extended their effort to the ballot box. Some felt it was critical to let Atlantans weigh in directly on the construction of a vast new law enforcement training center—and they were betting that the will of the people would ultimately come down on their side. On a more practical level, a referendum campaign struck Mary Hooks, a lead organizer for the Cop City vote coalition, as a straightforward process with delineated steps and rules: a signature collection phase, a break while the city verified them, then on to a massive voter turnout effort. “We were like, ‘This seems very clear in terms of the path that we need to be walking on,’” she recalled. 

As it turns out, the path has been anything but clear. The Atlanta city government has thrown up barriers at every turn, miring the petition gathering and signature approval process in bureaucratic and legal delays. The city has even drawn the ire of mainstream Democratic politicians and voting rights groups in its attempts to deploy classic forms of voter restriction. 

These roadblocks were made possible by the fact that the organizers are essentially starting from zero. Atlanta has never hosted a citizen-led referendum before, and therefore has few established structures in place to govern the process. “So much of what happened over the course of the past two years was entirely preventable, had we had a codified process that allowed everyone to know what the rules of the game were,” said Rohit Malhotra, the founder and executive director of Atlanta’s Center for Civic Innovation.

Since last September, Malhotra and others have sought to address this conundrum by drafting local legislation that would clarify the referendum process, now and for the future. That, too, has been met with interference from the mayor’s office. On Monday, the Atlanta city council finally passed legislation codifying rules and regulations for a referendum. But not before an 11th hour substitution that reintroduced signature matching, a form of verification that national voting rights groups have decried as burdensome and discriminatory. “Our ask was simple—we just wanted you to protect democracy.” Malhotra said during public comment this week. “This body has continued to break its word and to break our hearts.”

Now, as the Stop Cop City movement continues to wait for a federal appeals court to hand down a decision about the legality of the petition gathering process, there are still 16 boxes of five month-old signatures sitting untouched in City Hall. But, amidst this uncertainty, external deadlines are fast approaching. The referendum was originally supposed to appear on last November’s ballot, and it’s already too late for this year’s March presidential primary election, too. Organizers are now debating whether to aim for the ballot in May, when local primaries happen, or wait until November, when the presidential election might force Democrats nationally to weigh in on the fight, given Georgia’s battleground status. If the decision comes late enough, and city officials keep stalling, the choice may be made for them.

“If the city of Atlanta was really invested in elevating the voices of its residents, they would at least be ready,” said Analilia Mejia, the co-executive director of the Center for Popular Democracy Action, a national network of 50 organizations, three of which are local to Atlanta, that is supporting the referendum effort “They wouldn’t be running a clock.” 

From the beginning, Cop City has revealed the fault lines present in Atlanta’s system of representative democracy. Organizers started talking about the possibility of a popular referendum as early as September 2021. That was the month the city council first decided, over strenuous public opposition, to turn hundreds of acres of land in Atlanta’s South River Forest over to the Atlanta Police Foundation, which planned to build a massive training center for law enforcement and first responders—replete with a mock city to practice quelling street protests, an explosives test site, and multiple gun ranges. “By September (2021) it is clear that there’s organized money and organized special interests pushing this,” said Mejia. “It then becomes clear to us that we need organized people and some organized money to counter it.”

After almost two years of protest, the push to bring Cop City to a public vote came to fruition. In June 2023, in an echo of the 2021 meeting, the council voted to allocate tens of millions in public funds toward the training center—again, after hours of public comment, most of it against the measure. The coalition announced the referendum campaign the following day. 

Atlanta’s city charter gave Stop Cop City organizers 60 days to collect more than 58,000 signatures from city voters in order to get on the November ballot, a challenge in itself. But, almost immediately, the city started to stonewall. The city clerk delayed the beginning of the petition process by quibbling over the petition’s formatting, and in August, city officials announced that Atlanta would implement “signature matching”—the process of comparing a person’s signature on the petition to the one on file for them in state voter records. 

Signature matching has been used in many states for other voting practices, like authenticating absentee ballots. But it is widely considered to be an unnecessarily onerous form of verification that disproportionately excludes votes from people of color, English language learners, and the elderly and disabled. Atlanta’s decision to implement signature matching drew wide condemnation, including from Democratic leaders like Senator Raphael Warnock and voting rights groups founded by former gubernatorial candidate Stacy Abrams.

The city has also fought organizers on who can collect signatures. After residents in unincorporated areas of Dekalb County sued the city—arguing they were unfairly excluded from the petition drive despite living near the proposed training center site—a federal judge ruled in their favor. The judge’s order immediately expanded residency requirements for canvassers and restarted the 60-day timeline to gather signatures. The coalition says it delivered some 116,000 signatures in September (nearly double what they need to get on the ballot), but the city appealed and has refused to tally them and move forward with the referendum process until a federal appeals court issues its opinion. 

As they wait for the court’s decision, Stop Cop City Vote organizers have found themselves in limbo. “There’s a lot that I want to do and would like to be doing versus going back and forth with the city with something that should be so simple,” said Hooks. “We’re here for the long game struggle,” she went on, but acknowledged that the delays have taken a toll on some: “I know it’s been very disappointing and demoralizing in a lot of ways.” 

One antidote to this frustration was to start work on the proposal to codify a referendum procedure—a parallel track that doesn’t affect the court’s decision, but would jumpstart the process if the court rules in the organizers’ favor. 

The draft ordinance, crafted with the help of national voting rights lawyer Marc Elias and first introduced by Councilmember Liliana Bakhtiari in January, laid out procedures for reviewing the referendum petitions. Crucially, it aimed to preclude signature matching, which Malhotra called “non-negotiable.” Instead, the ordinance proposed a “curing” process to resolve inconsistencies, like the accidental omission of a middle name, that can trigger a signature invalidation.

But on Monday, two council members—including one who represents the affluent Buckhead neighborhood, which has in the past sought to secede from the rest of Atlanta and where many residents firmly support the construction of Cop City—forced language into the legislation that outlines a process for a version of signature matching. After Malhotra spoke for 10 minutes, imploring the city council to amend the legislation to remove signature matching, the body approved the ordinance anyway by a 10-5 vote. By then, the legislation had changed so much that Bakhtiari voted against it. 

Chaos ensued, with organizers, including Mary Hooks, occupying the dais to protest the last-minute change. “We see continuously the city betraying everyday people and our right to vote on issues that matter to us,” she told the room.

A federal appeals court ruling in the city’s favor could derail the referendum process even further. The city could argue that since the lower court’s earlier decision expanding the timeframe for people to collect signatures was overturned, the circumstances of their collection are now simply invalid—though Malhotra says such a decision would make the city look even worse. “I don’t think the mayor or the council, or the city in general, benefits from winning on a technicality,” Malhotra said. “For them to be like: ‘Well, I know we have these hundred and whatever thousand signatures but now we’re going to burn them’—I think that that’s just a politically silly thing for them to do.”
“But I don’t hold it beyond them,” he added. 

If the court rules in favor of the coalition, an entirely new scramble will ensue. Per its charter, the city has 50 days to stand up a referendum process. That’s where the new ordinance comes in. With more than 100,000 signatures collected, coalition members say they’re confident that they will cross the threshold even if some signatures are thrown out. But the verification process could still present issues. An analysis by the Associated Press and several local news outlets found a high number of seemingly invalid signatures. If the petition is approved despite these challenges, the question will then be whether to vote on it in May or November.

Many onlookers have struggled to understand why the city has invested so much energy and risked so much bad press in continuing to block a vote. “I cannot understand how the home of King and Lewis has the audacity to fight basic democratic process for any other reason than they are scared to lose,” said Malhotra. “From day one, this has been a process and procedure failure—and rather than addressing that underlying challenge, I think they underestimated the public’s appetite for transparency on process and procedure, and overestimated and overplayed their hand on trying to turn this into a binary conversation about policing and public safety.”

While legislation codifying a referendum process has passed, albeit with signature-matching included, there’s still no telling when the federal appeals court decision may come. In the meantime, there will be more direct actions. “Folks have said, like, ‘Hey, while we’re waiting and the referendum’s in limbo, and we still gonna give our elected officials the smoke—these corporations are also not going to be let off the hook,’” Hooks said. “We’re not going to lay the direct action component of this fight down just because the state repression is coming.” 

Sixty-one Cop City activists have been indicted for violating Georgia’s RICO act, and some 42 of them also have pending domestic terrorism charges. This week, state and federal law enforcement officers raided several Cop City opponents’ homes, taking at least two people into custody and reportedly refusing to show arrest warrants. 

On February 6, the Georgia state legislature passed a bill mandating cash bail for offenses like racketeering, domestic terrorism, criminal trespass, and “unlawful assembly.” It would also drastically limit bail funds’ ability to bond out protestors like Hooks and others who affixed themselves to construction vehicles on January 29. “On Monday when I left home,” Hooks recalled, “my wife was like, ‘Please come back. Please come back.’”

The post Faced with ‘Cop City’ Referendum Push, Atlanta Changes Up Its Election Rules appeared first on Bolts.

Patty Durand followed a pretty typical path into local politics. She thought her representative on the Georgia Public Service Commission—the body tasked with regulating gas, electricity, and telecommunications in the state—wasn’t doing enough for ratepayers who faced mounting monthly utility bills. Durand, who worked in the energy sector, says that after meeting with her representative on the commission, Tim Echols, she became convinced that he wasn’t doing the research necessary to understand the rate increases he regularly approved for power companies. So, in July 2021, she launched a campaign to replace him in the 2022 midterms. 

“I started looking around for other candidates,” Durand said, “Then I thought, ‘Nobody’s gonna say and do what I want, I’d better just run myself.’ So that’s what I did.”

But nearly two years after Durand entered the race, no election has taken place. Her race against Echols, a Republican incumbent, was canceled last year after a federal judge ruled that the state’s system for electing utility commissioners violates the federal Voting Rights Act. Echols remains in office to this day, many months after his term was set to expire, as state appeals have continued to delay any new utility commission elections. 

A year before Durand filed as a candidate, environmental justice and voting rights advocates filed a federal lawsuit against the state challenging how representatives on the Georgia Public Service Commission (PSC) are elected in the first place. While commissioners ostensibly represent and are required to live within five distinct districts, elections for these seats are held at-large—meaning voters statewide get to weigh in on elections for each district, not just those who live there.

Brionté McCorkle, executive director of the Atlanta-based Georgia Conservation Voters, and one of the main plaintiffs in the suit, argued that this system dilutes the power of Black voters to elect the candidate of their choice, in violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Her lawsuit, which sought district-wide voting for PSC seats and a majority-Black PSC district around the Atlanta region, cited a long history of this voting structure being used to disenfranchise Black Georgians, dating back to 1906, when commission elections were first changed to at-large by a governor who ran on an explicit platform of disenfranchising African Americans. 

McCorkle tried educating and organizing voters to make their voices heard on the utility commission, but eventually realized that this wasn’t a winning strategy for Black voters in District 3, which covers Atlanta and the surrounding metro area. The district, like the commission at large, has for the past 30 years been represented by mostly white Republican men, despite the tendency of voters in that district to support Democrats in other races.

“They don’t feel accountable to their voters,” McCorkle said. “And that’s what I started to look at. Why do they feel like they can just ignore what the people who elect them are saying they want? Then I started looking at the election structure.”

After a five-day trial last summer, a federal judge sided with the plaintiffs and ruled in August 2022 that the commission must end at-large voting for PSC representatives. Elections for two commission seats that were slated to occur in November were put on hold, including the one Durand, a Democrat who is white, was running in. By that point, however, her campaign had already been thrown into chaos—GOP lawmakers gerrymandered her out of the Athens-area district where she had sought to challenge the incumbent. 

As it has unfolded, the conflict over utility commission elections in Georgia has shone a harsh light on a government body that often goes unnoticed by voters, despite its everyday impact on their lives and budgets. The now years-long fight for equal representation on the PSC also highlights the anti-democratic lurch of these state oversight commissions, from at-large elections and gerrymandered districts diluting the voting power of minority communities to a larger trend of states removing voters from the equation in lieu of governor-appointed commissioners.     

Among other duties, PSC commissioners are tasked with regulating Georgia Power, the utility company that generates and supplies electricity to more than 2.6 million customers across the state. In addition to approving increases to the rates customers pay for their energy, the commission also has oversight over the company’s capital projects, including a $30 billion expansion to Plant Vogtle, a nuclear power plant. Since it was first approved in 2009, the expansion project has drawn widespread criticism for its exorbitant construction costs, which are then passed on to consumers, as well as potential environmental and health hazards stemming from radioactive waste. 

The power of the PSC to affect people’s everyday lives became glaringly apparent in March 2020 when commissioners responded to the COVID-19 pandemic by issuing a temporary moratorium on utility shutoffs for people who suddenly couldn’t pay their bills. But the relief was short-lived; months later, in July of that year, commissioners voted against extending the moratorium.

“They have a lot of oversight over real, kitchen-table [issues], everyday, lived experience in Georgia,” McCorkle said. “You get a ton of coverage over the Senate, and the governor, and the president, and then things like who’s actually making the decision about the power bill you have to pay every month, [people] don’t know anything about.”

Only two Black members have ever served on the commission in its entire 144-year history, both of whom were initially appointed to their seats by governors. David Burgess was both the first Black member and the last Democrat to sit on the commission, and was appointed in 1999. He won his election to retain the seat in 2000, but was defeated by a white Republican in 2006. Fitz Johnson, a Black Republican representing District 3, was appointed to the commission in 2021, after McCorkle and other activists had filed their lawsuit challenging the structure of PSC elections. 

McCorkle was joined in her lawsuit by several other Black residents of District 3, including James Woodall, then-president of the Georgia NAACP. They argued that while Black voters in the district have tried repeatedly to vote out Republican incumbents, their votes were outnumbered by white voters in the rest of the state. Black residents are indeed a voting minority in Georgia; they make up roughly 33 percent of voters across the state, and are regularly outnumbered by white voters in other statewide races. But in areas where they do have concentrated power, the plaintiffs argued, Black voters should have been able to elect the candidate of their choice, but were unable to do so because of at-large elections. During the trial, the court heard from Lindy Miller, a Democrat who ran for the District 3 seat the last time it went on the general election ballot in 2018 and lost despite winning a majority of votes in her district. 

“It’s not about partisanship, we’re upset because the preferred candidate of Black voters can’t win, regardless of who that preferred candidate is,” McCorkle said. “It doesn’t matter if it’s a Democrat, if it’s a Libertarian, [these voters] just don’t want the incumbent who has been approving bill increases to stay in that seat. What we’ve seen is that the preferred candidate cannot win in this election structure because of the vote dilution effect of the voters in the other parts of the state.”

In early 2022, while the lawsuit from activists was still winding through the courts, Georgia lawmakers redrew the PSC district lines to ensure the commission would retain a GOP supermajority even if federal judges forced the state to end at-large voting.

McCorkle says the gerrymandering was a direct response to their lawsuit. 

“[The redistricting committee] admitted that they were concerned about our ability to win this case,” she told Bolts. “So they drew these new districts intentionally to make one district less competitive and better for Republicans. It was just case-in-point gerrymandering.”

Lawmakers also gerrymandered the maps to target one candidate in particular: Durand, who was drawn out of the district she had been campaigning for. She then filed her own lawsuit against the secretary of state appealing her disqualification from the ballot, and evidence in the case revealed PSC commissioners—including Echols, whom she was campaigning against—had colluded to draw her out of the district. (While PSC elections were at-large, they still required members to file and live in certain districts). A state court judge sided with Durand and allowed her to remain on the ballot for the seat, writing in her ruling, “The record here contains substantial evidence that District 2 was drawn to exclude Ms. Durand, specifically, as a candidate.” 

The win was short-lived: Hours later, on the same day as that state court ruling allowing Durand to stay on the ballot, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a separate federal court ruling in favor of McCorkle’s lawsuit challenging at-large districts, which blocked those races from appearing on the midterm election ballot.

The state immediately filed an emergency injunction, pending an appeal, to try to get the PSC races back on the November ballot, but then backtracked. Since then, no election has been held for the District 2 and 3 seats, whose representatives continue to make decisions on the commission despite being elected to terms that were supposed to end in January 2023. The episode adds to the list of canceled elections that Georgia has experienced in recent years. 

“We’ve just been in a gray area,” McCorkle said. “And the way that the statute was written that created the public service commission races, it says the commissioners are allowed to serve until their successor is elected. So that means these folks are just sitting in these seats—basically squatting.” 

Durand, who wasn’t able to run in November, has a similarly ambivalent feeling about how things turned out. 

“At first I was really furious because I’d been running my campaign for so long, we’d been working so hard, we were 80 days away from the vote,” Durand said. She says she was hoping to capture many of the voters who turned out for Stacey Abrams in the gubernatorial race, but realized once Abrams lost, she likely would have too. 

“The tiny silver lining is that I get to run again.” 

The federal court ruling blocking at-large elections for Georgia’s utility commission was groundbreaking for applying an argument about vote dilution to a statewide elected body as opposed to smaller jurisdictions like cities or townships, where such voting rights battles more commonly occur. 

But barriers to equal representation and democratic access around regulatory oversight bodies are hardly isolated to Georgia. In 2020, New Mexico voters amended its constitution to switch its public utility commission from an elected body to a governor-appointed one, eliminating a majority-Native district that routinely elected Native representatives to the public utility commission. (Several Native nonprofits later sued over the change, but the New Mexico Supreme Court ruled against them.) 

New Mexico follows a larger trend of states moving away from elected public utility commissions, which have slowly disappeared over the past century, according to research by legal scholar and frequent Bolts contributor Quinn Yeargain. Today, just 11 states have elected public utility commissions, down from roughly half of states at the start of the 20th century. Among these states with elected commissions, representing roughly 66 million Americans, most elections occur statewide. But where districts do exist, they are regularly subjected to gerrymandering without much legal pushback, according to Yeargain––often flying under the radar of legislators, activists, and everyday voters. For example, Democratic lawmakers in Montana objected to newly-drawn utility commission districts that heavily favor Republicans, but the map ultimately passed the legislature this past April. 

All of this has meant that, even when elected, commissioners often serve the interests of the companies they’re meant to regulate, says Caroline Spears, executive director of Climate Cabinet Action, and advocacy group that supports political candidates based on their climate action policies. 

“Usually the biggest and sometimes only funder of these races are the utilities that they regulate directly,” Spears said. “The ability of utility [companies] to put a bunch of money into politics, and then recoup all of their costs by just charging their ratepayers for it—it’s just really an unlimited pot of money. And that ability is alive and well whether the public service commission is elected or not.” 

Because these commissions have such direct control over the way energy companies conduct their business, many aggressively lobby commissioners—as well as the politicians who appoint them—to achieve their desired policy outcome, from approving major capital expenditures for new projects to continuing to invest in fossil fuels like coal and natural gas over clean energy technologies like wind and solar.  

“From a climate and clean energy perspective, public utility commissions couldn’t be more important,” Spears said. “They can set 100 percent clean energy goals and decide how much, and how fast, clean energy like solar and wind are added to the grid. When monopoly utilities try to block wind and solar, we need our public utility commissioners to fight back and build the clean energy economy of the future, not squash the market.” 

In Georgia, this has all come to a head in the debate over the expansion of Plant Vogtle, which is currently $17 billion over budget and seven years behind schedule. The ballooning costs have meant that Georgia Power ratepayers have already paid an additional $913 in advance charges, and are expected to see $3.78 added to their monthly power bills once the plant is up and running, although recent estimates conducted by PSC staff put that additional monthly cost much higher at $17.20 per month for the first five years of the plant’s operation. Still existing commissioners, including Echols, who has been shown to have ties to energy industry execs, have maintained their support for the expansion plans. 

Such critical decisions are a major reason why Durand, McCorkle, and others feel an urgency to hold new PSC elections. Echols and Johnson, the District 2 and 3 incumbents who were supposed to face challengers at the ballot box last year, can remain active and voting members on the commission until a final ruling in the lawsuit McCorkle filed three years ago, which is currently pending at the 11th U.S Circuit Court of Appeals.

“There are serious public policy implications of two commissioners voting on billions of dollars of rate increases whose terms expired,” Durand said. “Echols and Johnson should not be voting.”

Observers believe that the ultimate decision in the lawsuit over at-large PSC elections could be influenced by the Supreme Court’s June 8 ruling in Allen v. Milligan, when the court surprised many by upholding a key section of the Voting Rights Act and striking down racially gerrymandered district maps in Alabama. McCorkle hopes this precedent will soon lead to an appeals court ruling supporting their case. But even then, further appeals, possibly even to the Supreme Court, could take years to fully resolve, says Bryan L. Sells, the lead lawyer for the plaintiffs.

“There’s a really good chance that whichever way the 11th Circuit panel rules, the losing side will try to seek further review,” Sells said. “These cases take forever.”

In the meantime, the path forward for PSC elections isn’t clear either.  

“If there is a new election, are there new rules? Old rules? Do we get new districts? What is the new structure gonna be if we do get the ruling upheld?” McCorkle said. “It’s just an endless flow chart of possibilities at this point.”

Theoretically, there is nothing stopping the Georgia legislature from redesigning the races according to the original federal district court ruling, but they have not taken any action while the appeal is pending. So for now, the elections remain in limbo. 

Even though this effort to make the PSC elections more fair in the long run has had the effect—for now—of halting them entirely, McCorkle has no regrets. She sees this fight over one arcane corner of government as part of a larger continuum, extending from Black voters in Georgia’s past fighting for equal rights and representation to a younger generation of voters fighting for sustainable energy in a rapidly changing climate. 

“It’s all very deeply connected. Because who’s hurt? It’s this more diverse wave of voters and younger voters who are inheriting the country and the planet,” McCorckle said. “Because we’re inheriting it, we have a greater stake in it. We should be able to exercise our right to elect leaders who we think will do the right thing.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the year the commission first approved the Plant Vogtle expansion. This story has also been updated with a PSC estimate of added monthly costs due to the expansion.

The post Canceled Elections Leave Georgia’s Utility Commission in Anti-Democratic Limbo appeared first on Bolts.

Senate Bill 92, signed by Governor Brian Kemp on Friday, adds to the GOP’s nationwide crackdown against reform-minded prosecutors who have adopted such “declination” policies. Texas Republicans are in the process of passing a bill meant to force the hand of district attorneys who have ruled out enforcing abortion bans. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis removed Tampa’s prosecutor from office in August, pointing to statements he’d made about protecting abortion. Similar moves are underway in other states.

The bill sets up a new board with the authority to oust DAs who don’t fulfill their duties. It also redefines the duties of DAs—and so what counts as grounds for removal—to specify that they cannot “categorically” refuse to prosecute offenses that they are “by law required to prosecute.”

Criminal justice reformers have long aimed for increased oversight over DAs, frustrated that prosecutors routinely violate ethics and defendants’ rights with little consequence. In the wake of the shooting of Armaud Arbery and of allegations that a local DA blocked investigations into his death in 2020, Georgia Democrats proposed a bill that would have created a similar state disciplinary board. But their bill did not contain a mandate that DAs file charges based on all existing laws. Republicans added that language when they repurposed the proposal this year, motivated in part by the aftermath of Dobbs, and Democratic lawmakers opposed the resulting bill. 

One of Republicans’ prime target is Deborah Gonzalez, the Democratic DA of Athens-Clarke and Oconee counties. Gonzalez won on a progressive platform in 2020 and quickly rolled out reforms that included ending prosecutions over marijuana possession, a charge that has been used in Athens to target Black residents. After the Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade in June, Gonzalez joined other Georgia DAs in saying she would not prosecute abortion. 

Republicans have signaled that they want their new state board to kick Gonzalez out of her elected office over cases she is not charging. “What do we do about these prosecutors who won’t prosecute?” asked Ed Setzler, a GOP lawmaker from Acworth, two hours west of Athens.

Bolts talked to Gonzalez about SB 92 after the bill passed the legislature. She denounced it as antidemocratic and said her critics want to override an election because they dislike its outcome. She also made the case that it’s appropriate for DAs to not prosecute certain cases—including abortion. In fact, she said, this approach can be a boon for public safety. 

“Prosecutorial discretion has not been a problem for generations,” she said, “but because you have a new class of reform-minded prosecutors coming into power who can now use that same discretion to hold people accountable but in a fair and just way, now it’s a problem.”.

Gonzalez has survived other efforts to reduce her power. When she declared her candidacy, Kemp tried to altogether cancel the local DA race, part of a pattern of election cancellations in Georgia, but the state supreme court stepped in to restore the election, which Gonzalez won in a December 2020 runoff. Republicans then proposed a bill to cut her circuit in two. Gonzalez now also faces a lawsuit, filed by a business owner in Athens, that alleges that she is not doing her job and is refusing to prosecute certain offenses like drug cases.

Besides SB 92, Georgia Republicans proposed other bills this year that target prosecutors. One bill would have lowered the number of signatures people have to collect to force a recall election against a DA from 30 to 2 percent of registered voters; the bill died in the state House when the session ended. 

Fueling this trend in Georgia is Republican anger toward Fulton County DA Fani Willis, who is investigating former President Donald Trump for his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

Willis, who is Black, has denounced the GOP bills as a “dangerous” effort to overturn a series of wins by people of color in the state’s 2020 prosecutor races—a criticism that Gonzalez also echoed in her interview with Bolts.

What is your reaction to SB 92 and the new board it sets up?

This is not an oversight bill. It’s an overstep on the part of the legislature to undermine the voice and vote of the people who elected us as DAs based on our approach and what they felt they wanted, in terms of the way that justice should be done in their community. This just takes all of that away. 

That happens whenever there’s a shift in power, when people who have traditionally been oppressed are now in those positions because that’s what the community wanted. Those who had always stood by the status quo are not happy and are resisting the change. 

When you look at their rhetoric about rogue DAs, progressive DAs, they’re looking at mainly women of color, Democratic DAs who were elected—especially in 2020. 

When you talk of your approach to justice, are there specific policies that you think are driving the reaction you describe? 

With the overturning of Roe v. Wade, myself and a couple of other prosecutors have come out and said that we would not prosecute women who were seeking reproductive health care nor the doctors who are providing that. I think that was something that many people were against. 

That was part of my campaign platform [in 2020], even though it predated Dobbs. Because we knew this was a possibility. Reproductive health rights have always been attacked in the South.

Or, the fact that we said we would focus on serious and violent crime instead of low-level crimes and misdemeanors, focus on those crimes that have the most impact in terms of our community safety, instead of necessarily going after people for simple possession of marijuana. 

It seems important to you to say that you ran on these issues. 

Exactly. If you look at my campaign website, if you look at my campaign materials, this was my platform, this is what I ran on, and this is what the community elected. I didn’t hide it away. 

So much used to happen behind closed doors; they talk about the black box of the judiciary because nobody knew how decisions were made. Now you’re seeing reform minded DAs who are much more transparent in what is happening in their offices, our platforms and what our policies are. That had not happened before.

Republican lawmakers are defending the new law by saying it’s not appropriate for prosecutors to set up a ‘declination’ policy, to say they won’t prosecute a type of cases. What is your approach on that, in terms of how you see the job of a DA?

First of all, every DA office around the country has to prioritize to their capacity. We cannot, it is an impossibility, take every single case all the way to trial. We have limited resources, we only have a certain amount of time. I’ve been asking my county to help me and give me more resources and raise the salaries, I have been very vocal that we have a prosecutor shortage; we had our chief justice of the Georgia supreme court come out saying that we have a prosecutor shortage, especially outside of the Atlanta area, so this is not a secret. 

Number two, because we have limited resources, isn’t it better to say, “Look, we’re going to focus on the really important serious stuff here, let’s not waste our time on making arrests on these things?” Do we look at every single case? Yes, absolutely, we do: Before we say what we’re going to do with it, we look at every single one of them, and then make our decisions. But we do prioritize the most serious and the most violent of those cases. 

Number three, I think there is a factor of public safety. My community elected me because they feel I shared their values, and by me saying I will not prosecute women for seeking reproductive health care. That also gives a sense of security and safety to women, those constituents of mine, who may have to undergo an abortion—whether it’s medically necessary, or if it’s a choice for them that they make with their doctor about their body—that they feel that they won’t have to worry about being then charged with something, that they can go to a fully licensed doctor and not have to do something in the back alleys, which can put at risk their lives even more so. 

Several of your colleagues, including Atlanta’s DA Fani Willis, have pointed to adultery laws when they’ve responded to the view that it’s inappropriate for a DA to not prosecute. They’ve said that adultery is illegal in Georgia and yet no DA goes after adultery cases. Now, this new law bars DAs from “categorically” refusing a type of charge, so how does that affect the status quo on adultery?

I don’t think there’s anybody who would really want to see us all of a sudden start prosecuting adultery. 

The first thing is, somebody’s got to get arrested: The police have to do the arrest, we don’t have arresting authority. And I don’t think the police are gonna go out and arrest people.

And no one is objecting that the police have the discretion to not arrest people for adultery.

Right.

Besides marijuana, which you mentioned earlier, one complaint in the lawsuit filed against you is that you’re not prosecuting drug cases. What is your office’s approach to that area?

Marijuana is very different from other kinds of drugs. We’ve never stopped what people consider the traditional prosecution of having drugs with the intent to sell, or producing drugs with the intent to sell. We have always prosecuted those. What we look at is, is that person who has that certain amount of drugs—we have accountability courts that we can put them in if they really have a serious drug addiction. So let’s say we have somebody who’s done 10 shoplifting cases: Maybe the issue is not that they’re shoplifting; the issue is, why are they shoplifting? And if they’re shoplifting to see an addiction, then we need to get them help for the addiction. But putting them in jail just for shoplifting again isn’t going to help them; we have to give them the help that they need to deal with a substance abuse or mental health issue, or whatever it is, to get to the cause. That’s what I look at. 

I think people have this idea that prosecution is only what happens in front of the court, that it’s only a trial. I take the view that prosecution is everything that we do in that case, from intake and looking at it and determining, ‘Do we have enough evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt, or do we need to dismiss it because there’s missing evidence? Are we going to proceed with accountability courts, or a pre-trial diversion program, or a restorative justice program?’ All that is still prosecution because all that is still holding people accountable for what they’ve done; it’s just holding them accountable in a more humane way and focusing on rehabilitation to reduce recidivism. And then there are those cases where those alternatives do not fit.

One of the things I see in the lawsuit is the idea I’m not doing my job. What they’re really trying to say is they don’t like the way I’m doing my job and they want to determine how I should do my job.

When you responded to my interview request, you knew that I wanted to ask about SB 92 and your policies. How do you think about the consequences of accepting an interview on this topic, since you’re also saying that your public stance on these matters is part of what the law targets?

I always felt I had a target on my back. I had my platform, many of them were not happy when I won, they started immediately with trying to secede, they put in this bill. 

I give these interviews though because I want people to understand where I’m coming from and where reform-minded prosecutors come from: We take public safety very seriously, we just believe there’s a better way to do it than just incarcerating people. And we want to be able to use the same tools: Prosecutorial discretion has not been a problem for generations, but because you have a new class of reform minded prosecutors coming into power and who can now use that same discretion to hold people accountable but in a fair and just way, now it’s a problem. 

I believe part of that is based on racism, and based on the idea that it threatens the status quo that has kept Black, brown, and poor people oppressed through the criminal legal system. 

I don’t think there’s anything more that I could say that would get me into more trouble, or make the target bigger on my back than what it is. I’ve been open and bold from the beginning, and I think that’s part of the reason why my community elected me because they wanted somebody who would speak for them.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The piece was updated on Friday evening to reflect that Governor Brian Kemp signed the bill.

The post “A Target on My Back”: New GOP Law Aims to Force Georgia Prosecutors’ Hands appeared first on Bolts.

Ramon Mejía was in the swamp for less than a day before he was arrested, but that brief experience made clear the enormity of what he had gone there to protect. Mejía, an Iraq War veteran and anti-war activist from Dallas, had traveled to the Atchafalaya Basin, the largest wetland in the country, to try to prevent Energy Transfer Partners’ construction of a conduit that would connect the company’s infamous Dakota Access Pipeline to Louisiana refineries. He and two other water protectors camped in the swamp the night of August 17, 2018, watching as the sun began to illuminate a beautiful but harrowing scene the next morning. “After the sunrise, you’ll see the birds and vegetation more clearly, the plants and the flowers—and also the destruction,” he recalled. “The construction of the pipeline, how it tore through the land.” Then, the police showed up. 

Mejía, his two colleagues, and a journalist who was embedded with the group were arrested under Louisiana’s newly minted ‘critical infrastructure’ law, which makes nonviolent protest near oil, gas, electrical, and other forms of infrastructure a felony and ratchets up the punishment associated with these actions. Such laws have proliferated across the country in the last five years and are now on the books in 19 states due to the efforts of the conservative legislators’ organization known as the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and the meticulous lobbying of powerful oil and gas companies. 

Thus far, states have rarely used critical infrastructure laws against protestors. Until late last year, there was only one other known instance, against Greenpeace protestors in Houston. Nobody has ever been convicted under them. 

But the arrest of more than 40 activists in Georgia between December 2022 and early March may signal a turning point, researchers who track these laws say. The activists were protesting the installation of a training center in the Atlanta forest known as ‘Cop City’ and the destruction of one of Atlanta’s vital green spaces.

The activists, many of whom are still detained, were charged under Georgia’s domestic terrorism and critical infrastructure law. Their arrest warrants, issued by county and local police and the Georgia Bureau of Investigations, don’t accuse the vast majority of them of any specific crimes beyond trespassing, but rather for “participating” with others who have allegedly engaged in far more serious offenses such as arson and discharging firearms. “The arrest warrants are broad and generic and certainly don’t have any individualized facts or information tied to them,” said Lauren Regan, the director of the Oregon-based Civil Liberties Defense Center, which has been coordinating legal support on the ground and will be representing a number of the protesters individually. “They’re basically saying, ‘Because you were wearing black or because you had mud on your shoes or because you had a jail support number written on your arm, you’re guilty for any crimes that anyone else potentially committed.’” 

The charges against the Georgia protesters illustrate how anti-protest legislation is wielded to quash both the movement for police accountability and the fight for environmental justice. The goal is not necessarily to win in court but to levy charges of such extreme consequence against protestors that it effectively quells dissent. 

“One of the ways that people have an impact on what’s happening in their communities or in their country outside of voting are things like protesting,” Rico Sisney, one of the Greenpeace protesters arrested in Houston, told Bolts. But when you add the risk of steep penalties and felony charges that accompany critical infrastructure laws, he said, “there’s a lot of people who might have considered participating because it’s like an issue that really matters to them—but they can’t take that additional risk. And that’s 100 percent the goal.”

Critical infrastructure laws represent a backlash to Indigenous-led protest movements, which have stopped or delayed the equivalent of at least a quarter of yearly emissions in the U.S. and Canada, according to a 2021 report by the Indigenous Environmental Network. 

The first critical infrastructure laws were proposed and passed following the success of protesters at Standing Rock in temporarily halting the Dakota Access Pipeline, said Emma Fisher, the deputy director at Climate Cabinet, an advocacy and lobbying organization focused on climate change legislation. Fisher co-authored a report on critical infrastructure laws last year. “[Bill author] Rep. Scott Biggs of Oklahoma directly cited North Dakota’s Dakota Access Pipeline protests, acknowledging that anti-pipeline demonstrations have succeeded and therefore the pipelines haven’t been built,” Fisher told Bolts. “That direct line is clear.” 

When that bill passed in Oklahoma, ALEC took note, drafting a model bill it dubbed the ‘Critical Infrastructure Protection Act.’ Like the Oklahoma law, the model bill had two key components that would become characteristic of nearly all critical infrastructure laws. First, it turned conduct that would have previously been a misdemeanor into a felony—and jacked up the consequences to match. “One of the problems with these really high penalties is, if you’re charged, even if you know you’re innocent, do you really want to risk going to trial on it?” said Nick Robinson, a senior legal advisor at the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law (ICNL), which maintains a comprehensive anti-protest law tracker. “That trial process will take a long time—but also, let’s say you did lose, you’d face potentially a lot of time in prison. And so some people might feel pressured into just taking a plea.”

“One of the most important takeaways from our research is that these bills are intentionally vague,” Fisher said. “That is causing a chilling effect for protesters and for prospective demonstrators because people are not sure how much danger they might be in.” 

Furthermore, the legislation established the concept of ‘vicarious liability,’ leaving organizations potentially on the hook for the alleged actions of even loose affiliates. “It broadens the net, both in who can be liable but also who law enforcement can investigate and potentially arrest and prosecute—whether or not a court ever finds them liable,” said Robinson. 

Connor Gibson, a Denver-based fossil fuel opposition researcher who has become an expert on critical infrastructure laws, says they have a compound chilling effect. “Not only will they have activists who are aware of the potential felony charges and how that could really screw up their life, even if they don’t get convicted, but they are sending a message to all these organizations like, ‘Hey, if anybody you were ever affiliated with gets charged under one of these laws, we’re going to go after you for $100,000 and we’re going to sue you into the ground.’” 

ALEC may have provided the language, but the country’s biggest oil and gas manufacturers and associations have worked behind the scenes to get state lawmakers across the country on board with critical infrastructure laws. “The tip of the spear is really the AFPM,” Gibson said—the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, a powerful trade organization that represents companies such as Koch Industries, Chevron Corporation and ExxonMobil, among others. 

While support for critical infrastructure laws has overwhelmingly fallen along party lines, with Democratic governors vetoing bills in Minnesota and Louisiana, in 2019, Democratic legislators backed them in Illinois and Wisconsin after Koch Industries lobbied to get the trade unions on board. Ultimately, Wisconsin’s Democratic governor signed the bill into law.

Even if these laws have only very rarely been invoked by police, in the wake of the 2020 racial justice uprising, and as the fight for environmental justice continues to intensify, activists and researchers alike fear they could be trotted out and deployed with increasing frequency.  

“The threat is real,” said Gibson. “The most dire consequences have not yet been played out.”

Bill Quigley, a Loyola law professor who represents Mejía and the other protesters charged in Louisiana, warned that “the idea of terrorism… is becoming more and more common against environmental protesters and people who oppose the police.” He added, “I think the idea is to capture the emotion that people felt after 9/11 and to apply it to people sitting in trees, for goodness sake.”

Just before sunrise on September 12, 2019, Rico Sisney and 10 other Greenpeace protestors rappelled down the Fred Hartman Bridge in Baytown, Texas. Suspended hundreds of feet above the Houston Ship Channel, they unfurled a series of brightly-colored banners over the country’s largest fossil fuel thoroughfare, shutting down ship traffic for an entire day. 

Sisney hung there for over 12 hours, reading from Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Talents. “Looking at a waterway that has no ship traffic and just has dolphins splashing around, and seeing a literal sunset on oil infrastructure behind me,” he recalled, “counterintuitively, it was really, really peaceful.” 

That sense of tranquility ended abruptly when officers began extracting the protestors one by one as night fell. They were taken to shore, where Sisney said a group of hostile onlookers had gathered and began heckling them, tossing out racial slurs as they passed. The demonstrators were ultimately bundled into police vans and booked into the Harris County Jail.

Soon, the group was informed that they would be charged under Texas’s critical infrastructure law, which had gone into effect on September 1, less than two weeks before the action. The activists had been warned about the new law. “Intellectually, I understood that that was a strong possibility,” Sisney told Bolts.  “But then once it hit, it was like, okay, now I can actually feel this and what potential impacts that could have for me and my family and my community. “ 

For Sisney, a felony conviction would have compounded the racist assumptions and police scrutiny he already faces just for being Black. “I don’t have any criminal convictions on my record,” he said, but “In the many times I’ve been stopped by police, the first assumption is not only do I have charges but I have active warrants. I think it hits differently for Black people in America.” 

The critical infrastructure charges against Sisney and his fellow protestors didn’t stick. Six months after the action, prosecutors downgraded the charges to a misdemeanor count of obstructing a roadway, with a maximum penalty of 180 days in jail and a $2,000 fine. But there have been consequences nonetheless. Sisney said that some of his fellow defendants lost out on job opportunities. They were told that they couldn’t be arrested again—and if anyone was, it would have ramifications for everyone in the group. “For a lot of folks who probably would want to participate in other forms of direct action,” Sisney said, people had to “have an entirely different risk assessment for the years after the charges.” 

“Which is sort of the goal right of critical infrastructure laws in the first place,” he added, “to make the most active people inactive for as long as possible—and the most active organizations inactive.”

Karen Savage, an independent investigative journalist, had been embedded with the L’eau Est La Vie water protectors for months, reporting on their attempt to stop the construction of the Energy Transfer crude oil pipeline in the Louisiana wetlands. She had taken photographs, documented life in the swamp, and published an exposé in The Appeal on the pipeline company’s use of off-duty state law enforcement officers as private security guards. She knew what she was doing was risky, but she and the water protectors had written permission from one of the swamp landowners to be there, while the company had actually gone ahead with pipeline construction in violation of the owners’ wishes. If anyone was trespassing, she figured, it was them. 

On August 18, 2018, around sunrise, Savage joined Mejía, the anti-war veteran who had come there from Dallas, and several other activists in the swamp. Shortly thereafter, they were all arrested. In the holding cell at the county jail, they overheard their charges being read, and realized that police were invoking Louisiana’s new critical infrastructure law. 

Quigley, the lawyer, had noticed an immediate shift after the law went into effect on August 1. “They had probably 50 people that got arrested, and all on misdemeanors,” he recalled. “And then the change in the law, all of a sudden, the exact same conduct, there were people getting arrested for felonies.” 

“It was definitely apparent that these laws were being utilized as a weapon by the state to silence our voices,” said Mejía. 

Later that fall, more water protectors were arrested in the swamp—including herbalist and community organizer Anne White Hat, a member of the Aśke Gluwipi Tiospaye of the Sicangu Lakota, also known as the Rosebud Sioux. White Hat, who is originally from South Dakota, had helped found L’eau Est La Vie; the name—“water is life,” in French—is an intentional call back to the Standing Rock protest to shut down the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. “To me, we’re holding down the continuation of that fight up north,” she told Bolts. “We weren’t gonna let them just continue to build this black snake without any resistance.” 

The state had four years to decide whether to move forward with its case, and Savage and the 16 L’eau Est La Vie protesters arrested under the law lived under the threat of critical infrastructure charges for nearly three years. As a single mother, White Hat was fearful of what would happen to her three children should she go to prison. “It’s a very heavy burden to bear,” she said. “I was just hyper-aware of [the fact that] they could formally charge us any day.” She tried to embrace nake nula waun—a Lakota expression describing a state of constant readiness. One night, U.S. marshals came to arrest someone down the block from her in New Orleans, and she woke up to a reverberating pounding noise. “I shot straight up in bed and I was like, ‘Oh, my god, is this happening right now?’” she recalled. 

“It kind of hit me maybe in November of that year, like, ‘Wow, that’s 10 years in a Louisiana prison,’” Savage said. Fearful of risking another arrest and having her bail revoked, she stayed home during the January 6 attack on the Capitol, and barely covered the 2020 racial justice uprising. “It did impact my reporting,” she said. 

During this time, Mejía, Savage, and White Hat, the co-founder of L’eau Est La Vie, filed a constitutional challenge with the assistance of Quigley and a lawyer from the Center for Constitutional Rights, both of whom also served as their criminal defense lawyers. “Certainly they got much more consideration in state, local and federal courts because the Center for Constitutional Rights took up their cause and put literally thousands of hours into this thing,” said Quigley, who estimates that he worked hundreds of hours pro bono on the case himself. Finally, in July of 2021, two years and 11 months after the first arrests, the St. Martin Parish District Attorney announced that he was dismissing the critical infrastructure charges. White Hat said it took another year, until the statute of limitations passed, before she could really relax. 

It was the 2017 critical infrastructure law in Oklahoma that was seized upon by ALEC and became the template for other such legislation across the country. But Georgia’s Senate Bill 1 was proposed that same session. Legislators at the time said that the bill, which expanded the definition of ‘domestic terrorism,’ was intended to address mass casualty events, citing the massacre of nine Black churchgoers in South Carolina two years prior. The proposal withered on the vine—until legislators copied and pasted the bill’s text into a different one that passed. 

“Fast forward until December of 2022, when the first Atlanta forest defenders were charged with the statute for, in essence, trespassing,” said Regan of the Civil Liberties Defense Center. “It was certainly a far cry from what the legislators stated that their intent was in passing the statute.” The statute mandates a prison sentence of at least five years and up to 35 years for people convicted of disabling or destroying “critical infrastructure, a state or government facility, or a public transportation system.”

Regan said applying the law against the Cop City protesters is far-fetched—but again, convictions aren’t necessarily the point. Just being charged brings stark consequences: the activists were initially denied bail and most are currently detained in the DeKalb County Jail, which is notorious for squalid conditions and allegations of mistreatment by staff. According to Regan, a number of activists have complained about being denied medical care and medication while in jail. 

“Even though it’s very unlikely that they’ll ever get a conviction against trespassers for domestic terror, and there are a number of serious faults and failures in the state’s prosecution of land defenders thus far, the most negative consequences are already being forced upon citizens who are normally innocent until proven guilty, ” she told Bolts.

On March 23, the protesters still being held in custody in DeKalb County had their second bond hearing. Nine of the 22 were denied bail again and remain detained as of publication. According to Hannah Riley, an activist in Atlanta, the justifications for denying bail included protesters wearing black, having a jail support number scrawled on their arm, and having mud on their shoes. 

Meanwhile, a new crop of critical infrastructure bills in legislatures across the country could increase punishment for protesters, from Idaho to Minnesota to Illinois to North Carolina. Utah’s governor just signed two new infrastructure bills into law last month. 

Robinson of ICNL noted many of the new bills are somewhat distinct from the previous crop of critical infrastructure laws in that they are allegedly motivated by recent white supremacist attacks on energy substations and are not necessarily based on the language in the ALEC model bill; instead many build off existing law. Nevertheless, he said, “we and others are concerned that even if these bills are being enacted in response to attacks on electric substations, which we do not support in any way—it’s criminal already under the law—that if they’re overly broad or vague, that they could be used in other context against protesters.”

Many state legislatures are also considering broader anti-protest bills at the moment. Cop City is the focal point for that convergence, but there are two bills before the Georgia state legislature that advocates worry could quell protest: a critical infrastructure bill inspired by recent substation attacks, and an anti-riot bill. The punishment for violating either would be up to 20 years in prison. 

For White Hat, looking to the past has helped her steel herself against the uncertainty of this new landscape for protest. When she thought about the importance of the land she was defending, what came to mind was a late mentor of hers from Baton Rouge, a Choctaw woman who would come back to the Atchafalaya each year to go crawfishing. Her father had told her stories about how he had stood up against Dow Chemical’s pollution of the swamp back in the 1950s. “I feel connected to that,” White Hat told Bolts, noting that there has been a long history of Indigenous resistance to environmental degradation. “What is different and what is new is that the oil industry and South Louisiana hasn’t experienced this level of an organized resistance movement,” she said. “Ever.” 

The post “A Weapon by the State to Silence Our Voices” appeared first on Bolts.

From the very first days of early voting, voters queued in long lines all around the state waiting to cast their ballots in person. Some polling sites in the Atlanta metro area had estimated wait times of two to three hours.

A handful of counties offered Saturday voting on Nov. 26 after Thanksgiving, despite objections from the state’s Republican leadership, such as Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. The majority of the state opened the polls on Monday Nov. 28, which saw a record 300,000 people turn out. According to the secretary of state’s website, more than 1.7 million votes have been cast in early voting so far.

Speaking with Bolts, Crystal Greer from Protect the Vote GA, a grassroots group formed to combat voter suppression, said the current scramble to turn out voters was exactly what voting advocates worried about after the passage of Senate Bill 202 shortly after the 2020 election and Senate runoff. 

“We knew that what we’re seeing right now is what that bill was pretty much created to do,” Greer said. “The lines you’re seeing right now are not a good sign. A form of voter suppression.”

Just as they did two years before, Georgians are turning out to decide an open Senate seat in a runoff election after no clear winner emerged in the contest between Republican Herschel Walker and Democrat Raphael Warnock, the incumbent Senator. Control of the Senate is not at stake this time, but Democrats are looking to expand their majority.

But unlike the 2020 election, where the runoff period lasted nearly two months, this cycle there’s approximately four weeks with only five days of mandated early voting. Republicans tightened the runoff election period with a provision in SB 202 last year, a move that advocates at the time worried would make voter turnout more difficult.

The bill, signed into law by Governor Brian Kemp in 2021 with support from Raffensperger and other Georgia Republicans, created myriad new obstacles for people who want to take part in the runoff. It has meant, for one, that people could not register to vote after Nov. 8 because there isn’t enough time for them to get on the voter rolls, unlike in the run-up to the 2021 runoffs. 

It also shortens the window to vote by mail, a procedure that Democrats have rushed toward since the pandemic; voters had less time to request a mail-in ballot (that deadline was Nov. 25) and must mail it back by the deadline of runoff Election Day. It also limited the use of secure absentee ballot drop boxes to only during the early voting period. Ballot drop-off was further restricted to the times early voting polling stations are open, versus 24-hour availability in 2020. 

That change has added pressure on the state’s in-person voting facilities, as already short-staffed polling places have had to simultaneously certify the results of the general election and prepare for the runoff election. Capacity has been a factor in the serpentine lines voters have had to contend with. 

Most contentiously, the shorter window threatened the viability of weekend voting. Raffensperger’s office originally interpreted the law to prohibit early voting on Saturday, Nov. 26, due to an existing law saying that voting cannot be held immediately following a state holiday. A lawsuit filed before Thanksgiving challenged Raffensperger’s determination, leading upwards of 22 out of 159 counties to open locations for Saturday voting. 

All of these restrictions have impacted students home for the holidays and full-time workers unable to wait in line during the week, for whom the importance of weekend voting—along with these other alternative methods of voting—cannot be stressed nearly enough. 

During a press briefing, Vasu Abhiraman, senior policy counsel at the ACLU of Georgia, spoke about the challenges the tight timeline and confusion around Saturday voting caused for many voters, including students. 

“We had short lines on Election Day two years ago, for both the general election and the runoff, because there were robust early voting opportunities and opportunities to vote by mail,” Abhiraman said. “What do we see here for the runoff? Well, we see absentee by mail, nearly an impossible proposition. We have been contacted by so many out-of-state students who are worried about voting absentee by mail.” 

Abhiraman said he waited an hour and 45 minutes to vote at a library in DeKalb County in metro Atlanta. 

Besides the confluence of issues during this runoff that stems from SB 202, Raffensperger’s actions as secretary of state have fueled challenges. Raffensperger gained national attention for opposing then-President Donald Trump’s subversion effort in 2020, but he then channeled that reputation to defend the GOP’s changes to voting laws. 

“The cries of ‘voter suppression’ from those on the left ring as hollow as the continuously debunked claims of ‘mass voter fraud’ in Georgia’s 2020 election,” he said in 2021.

But Raffensperger has a history of fanning the flames of suspicions about election integrity; in the 2020 primary he created a criminal task force to investigate alleged absentee ballot fraud after mailing all eligible Georgia voters an absentee ballot application. (Nearly two years later, the group’s investigation found virtually no fraud.) After the general election, Raffensperger created a process with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation to conduct a signature audit of absentee ballots in Cobb County, something he previously had indicated was not possible. 

In the run-up to the runoff, he issued guidance claiming the provision of Saturday voting after a holiday ahead of the Dec. 6 runoff was prohibited by a state statute, even though he had not challenged Saturday voting after a holiday ahead of the Jan. 5, 2021, runoff. Even after Saturday voting was allowed to proceed, Raffensperger’s office signaled to the state legislature it should address “the confusion.” That could result in an outright ban on Saturday voting in future runoffs. Georgia Republicans retained control of the state government on Nov. 8, so they have the ability to further restrict voting laws in their next legislative session. 

Meanwhile, students like Madeline Berns are already experiencing challenges trying to vote. Berns told Bolts that she lives an hour south of where she currently attends school. Planning to vote in the 2022 general election, Berns said she applied for an absentee ballot on Sept. 23. She said the ballot was issued on Oct. 11 but never received it. 

“On Election Day, I had to skip school and leave a medical appointment early to vote at my assigned polling place,” Berns said. “It took about three hours out of my day and 80 miles worth of gas. The poll workers hadn’t filed a provisional ballot before, so they were confused. We got it worked out, though.”

​​Reflecting on the 2020 election, Berns said she voted absentee without issue. With the tight turnaround for the runoff election, she planned to drive home on Election Day.  

“I don’t want to risk that again, so I didn’t apply for another absentee ballot,” she said. “My county didn’t have early voting when I was home for Thanksgiving. It’s unfortunate because I’ll be in the middle of finals season, but I think it’s important.”

Voting rights advocates and engagement organizers say the secretary of state should have done more to ensure voters had the best information available about polling locations and voting options. County election boards, which in the 2020 election took advantage of donations from voting-focused non-profit organizations such as the Center for Tech and Civic Life to fund election administration, were banned from directly receiving such funding under SB 202. The secretary of state’s office has the power to step up its assistance, but so far has not, leaving non-profit organizations to stand in the gap.

During a press briefing at the start of early voting, Stephanie Ali, policy director at the New Georgia Project, said the coalition reached out to officials in each of the state’s 159 counties to get the correct information out to voters. According to Ali, the secretary of state’s site had little to no information going into the weekend early voting. 

“We did the legwork,” said Ali. “This is work that shouldn’t have to be done by nonprofit organizations. It shouldn’t have to be done by political entities. It should be done by our counties, especially our Secretary of State.”

Greer said that some polling locations around the state needed more workers on site, resulting in long lines during early voting. She attributed the poll worker shortage partly to the increased attacks on poll workers in the aftermath of the 2020 election. 

“You have this bottleneck happening in these lines because there’s only two people working or something like that,” she said. “There’s no incentive to hire new poll workers. And also make them feel safe.”

The various accounts of workers being doxxed, harassed and threatened created a chilling effect for some who might otherwise sign up. Greer also said proper training was an issue. 

“We’re still evolving with these voting machines, and so if something goes down, there’s just not enough adequate training for that person to reboot it,” she said. “The line literally stops. Nothing’s happening until that gets fixed.”

Greer said the voter protection coalition would continue fighting for improvements in election administration and expanding ballot access. Georgia voters have remained resilient and continued to vote regardless of wait times and tight deadlines, right up through the final hours of early voting.

Berns believes schools could do more to help students engage in the electoral process, like having Election Day as a school holiday.

“I don’t even think it’s an excused absence here,” she said. “It would be better, though, to just make sure absentee ballots are approved, sent, and received in a timely fashion.”

Joanna Louis-Ugbo, a student at Emory University and organizer with the Georgia Youth Justice Coalition, echoed the importance of making voting accessible for students. 

“We had to fight to keep our precinct on campus because a lot of these students do not have cars or transportation to go to a precinct that will be a little bit further out,” Louis-Ugbo said. “It’s very important to have precincts on these campuses.”

The post Long Lines, Short Windows: How Georgia’s New Restrictive Voting Law Complicates the Senate Runoff appeared first on Bolts.

If they win in November, Trump-endorsed election deniers like Arizona’s Mark Finchem and Michigan’s Kristina Kamaro could seize the reins of election administration in key swing states on agendas built on disproven fraud claims and destabilizing changes like eliminating mail-in voting. But these high-profile candidates are just the tip of the iceberg: 17 Republicans are running for secretary of state—or for governor in states where the governor appoints the secretary—after denying the results of the 2020 election, seeking to overturn them, or refusing to affirm the outcome. A handful of additional Republicans haven’t outright questioned Biden’s win but have still amplified Trump’s false statements about widespread fraud.

Trump’s Big Lie, then, is defining the political stakes in most of the 35 states where the secretary of state’s office is on the line, directly or indirectly, in November. 

But beyond the threats of election subversion, secretaries of state affect voting rights in many more subtle ways. Long before Trump, they already featured heated debates around how states run their elections—and how easy or difficult it is for people to register and cast ballots. Secretaries of state may decide the scope of voter roll purges, instruct counties on how many ballot drop boxes to set up, or implement major policies like automatic voter registration. And their word carries great clout in legislative debates over voting. The Big Lie is overshadowing those functions, but in many places these broader issues remain at the forefront. 

This new Bolts guide walks through all of those 35 states, plus Washington, D.C., one by one. Voters are electing their secretary of state directly in 27 states; in another eight, the secretary of state will be selected after the election by public officials—the governor, or lawmakers—who are on the Nov. 8 ballot. (The 15 other states and Puerto Rico will either select theirs after the 2024 cycle or, in a few cases, don’t have a secretary of state at all.)

The stakes are highest in the presidential swing states that election deniers may capture, namely Arizona, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, and Pennsylvania (via the governor’s race). But many other states feature such candidates, from Alabama to Maryland; in Wyoming, a Trump-endorsed election denier is the only candidate on the ballot.

And other pressing voting concerns are also shaping these battles. In Ohio, for instance, voting rights groups have repeatedly clashed with the sitting secretary of state on voting access in jails or the availability of ballot drop boxes. In Georgia, the midterms are unfolding in the shadow of new restrictions adopted last year, with the incumbent’s support. In Vermont, the likely next secretary of state says she wants to support local experiments to expand voter eligibility. 

Not all secretaries of state handle election administration; in a few states such as Illinois and South Carolina, they have nothing at all to do with it. Even where secretaries of state oversee some aspects of the election system, the scope of their role can vary greatly. Arizona’s secretary of state, for instance, must certify election results; Michigan’s secretary, by contrast, plays no role in the certification process (that role is reserved to a board of canvassers) but does oversee and guide municipal officials on how to run their elections. 

To clarify this confusing landscape, Bolts published two databases this year. The first details, state by state, which state offices prepare and administer an election (Who Runs our Elections?). The second details, state by state, which state offices handle the counting, canvassing, and certification stages (Who Counts Our Elections?). 

Explore our state breakdown of the 2022 midterms below, or click on a specific state in this interactive map.

Secretaries of State in 2022

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#AL

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#AR

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#AZ

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#CA

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#CO

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections//#CT

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#FL

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#GA

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#IA

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#IL

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#ID

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#IN

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#KS

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#MD

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#MA

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#ME

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#MI

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#MN

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#ND

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#NE

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#NH

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#NM

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#NV

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#NY

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#OH

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#OK

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#PA

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#RI

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#SC

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#SD

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#TX

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#VT

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#WA

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#WI

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#WY

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#DC

For further reading, also dive into Louis Jacobson’s electoral assessment of all secretary of state races, and the FiveThirtyEight analysis of how each state’s Republican nominee is responding to questions about the 2020 elections. And you can

Alabama

Wes Allen, a Republican lawmaker who won a tight summer primary for secretary of state, has already shown his conspiracist leanings: He said earlier this year that, as secretary of state, he would promptly withdraw Alabama from the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), a organization that helps 30 states maintain voter rolls, citing George Soros to explain his decision shortly after a far-right website published an article that falsely tied ERIC to Soros. 

Allen faces Democratic nominee Pamela Laffitte in November. In this ruby red state, he is likely to win and replace John Merrill, the retiring Republican; Merrill is known for blocking people who criticize his handling of voting rights on social media and for denying the state’s history of voter suppression.

Arizona

Mark Finchem is arguably the election denier with the best chance to win and take over a swing state’s election system. A member of the far-right Oath Keeper militia, which was involved in the Jan. 6 insurrection, Finchem falsely claims that the 2020 election results were fraudulent, has pushed for controversial election audits, and wants to see sweeping changes to Arizona’s election system, including ending early voting and ending the use of electronic voting machines. If he wins, he would oversee the 2024 election, including being in charge of certifying the next presidential results. His intentions would be in question given his continued statements about 2020. He introduced legislation earlier this year to decertify the last election and “set aside” the ballots in three counties, including Maricopa and Pima counties, which together cover two-thirds of the state, as “irredeemably compromised”—a position he repeated in a debate last week.

“When we have conspiracy theories and lies like the ones Mr. Finchem has just shared, based in no real evidence, what we end up doing is eroding the faith that we have in each other as citizens,” responded Adrian Fontes, the Democratic nominee, during the debate. Fontes ran elections in Arizona’s most populous county as Maricopa County Recorder during the early stages of the pandemic; in March 2020, he tried to mail ballots to registered voters during the presidential primary, though his effort was ultimately struck down by courts, and Finchem has criticized him for it. Fontes has also been supportive of expanding voting opportunities through reforms like automatic voter registration. 

Arkansas

Republican incumbent John Thurston says elections are secure in Arkansas, but he also echoes those who sow doubts about how the 2020 election unfolded across the country, and his staff attended a conspiracist symposium hosted by Mike Lindell at state expense. In this staunch red state where Democrats have not won any statewide race since 2010, Thurston faces Democrat Anna Beth Gorman in November.

California

When U.S. Senator Kamala Harris became vice president in 2021, it sparked a game of musical chairs in California politics. Governor Gavin Newsom appointed Secretary of State Alex Padilla to replace Harris, and then appointed Shirley Weber to replace Padilla as secretary of state. A former Democratic lawmaker who championed civil rights legislation, such as a landmark law in 2020 to fight racism in juries, Weber is now seeking a full term. She crushed the all-party primary in June with 59 percent of the vote; Republican Rob Bernosky, who she will now face again in November’s Top 2 runoff, received 19 percent. (Two candidates who, unlike Bernosky, ran as election deniers won a combined 13 percent.) 

Colorado

Secretary of State Jena Griswold, a Democrat, has clashed since 2020 with Tina Peters, the Trump-aligned Republican county clerk who is now under indictment for allegedly allowing unauthorized access to voting equipment. The two seemed headed for a showdown in 2022 , but Peters lost the Republican primary in June to Pam Anderson, a former county clerk who, unlike Peters, accepts the results of the 2020 election. (Other election deniers also lost Republican primaries in Colorado at the county level in the primary, Bolts reported.) 

Griswold has still centered her campaign on the threat of election subversion, pointing to her efforts against Peters but also speaking out against election deniers in the national press. “The country could lose the right to vote,” she told The Guardian in August. Anderson, who is a career election administrator, says she would bring a “professional ethic” into the office, and is making the case that Griswold is too focused on advancing her party’s goals. Anderson also supports the major features of Colorado’s system, notably universal mail-in voting.

Connecticut

Stephanie Thomas, a Democratic lawmaker, faces Republican Dominic Rapini in an open contest. Rapini is the former board chair of an organization that promoted conspiracies about the 2020 presidential election, and he himself has raised doubts and false claims of fraud about the legitimate outcome of the race. While Thomas is favored in this blue-leaning state, observers stress that the rhetoric about voter fraud and election denialism can erode public confidence in voting systems even if Rapini loses. In addition, the two candidates disagree on rules around voter ID, which Rapini wants to tighten, and early voting. The state is holding a referendum in November on authorizing in-person early voting, an issue that Thomas supports and Rapini opposes.

Florida (via the governor’s race)

The power to appoint the secretary of state lies with the governor in Florida. Earlier this year, DeSantis—who has a penchant for filing government offices with his allies—appointed Cord Byrd, a staunch conservative who had championed the state’s recent voter restrictions while in the legislature. Byrd has refused to say whether he believes the 2020 election results were legitimate, and he has amplified false rhetoric about widespread fraud. The state’s new elections police force resides in the secretary of state’s office, and Byrd was involved in August in trumpeting the criminal charges against 20 people who had been previously allowed to vote for alleged voting law violations. 

DeSantis is up for reelection against Democrat Charlie Crist, who was the state’s Republican governor more than a decade ago and had a very different approach to voting. Crist would have the authority to replace Byrd should he win.

Georgia

Incumbent Brad Raffensperger famously rebuffed Trump’s attempts to “find” more votes in the 2020 election, and proceeded to defeat a Trump-endorsed election denier in the Republican primary with surprising ease. But Raffensperger has also supported the new voter restrictions that Republicans have adopted since 2020, including tightening procedures around mail-in and early voting, and banning groups from passing out food or water to voters waiting in line. He defended the measures in 2021 as a way to “restore voter confidence.”

Raffensperger faces Democratic nominee Bee Nguyen, a state representative who voted against the 2021 law, has criticized this record and is running on a platform of improving ballot access in Georgia with voter outreach efforts such as translating election materials into more languages and establishing sites for people to submit vote-by-mail applications. 

Idaho

Phil McGrane, the county clerk of Ada County, narrowly defeated two conspiracy theorists in the Republican primary for secretary of state in May. In a state as conservative as Idaho, that was the hard part; he is now favored in November over Democrat Shawn Keenan. On the one hand, this primary marked a defeat for fervent election deniers, who attacked McGrane for accepting grants from a private foundation—as did more than a dozen other counties in Idaho alone—to help run the 2020 election. 

Yet, when asked by Bolts if he agreed that Biden was the legitimate president, McGrane demurred, only saying that Biden was in the White House. He has spoken against Democratic proposals to strengthen voting rights. As county clerk, McGrane has also taken initiatives to make voting more accessible, such as setting up “food truck voting,” i.e. mobile voting centers, and setting up on-demand ballot printers, Bolts reported.

Illinois

This secretary of state’s office is not involved in election administration. (Alexi Giannoulias, the last Democrat to lose a U.S. Senate race in Illinois, faces Republican lawmaker Dan Brady. Incumbent Jesse White is retiring after 24 years leading an office that handles driver’s licenses and state records.)

Indiana

Diego Morales rode the Big Lie to oust the incumbent secretary of state, Holli Sullivan, at the Republican Party’s state convention; he echoed Trump’s claims about fraud in the 2020 election, which he called a “scam.” He has since softened those statements, including calling Biden the legitimate president, and has walked back his previous call to cut Indiana’s number of early voting days by half. Still, he has courted controversy, as the Indianapolis Star reported in July that he used campaign funds to buy a personal vehicle. Morales also twice left jobs at the secretary of state’s office over poor performance.

Democrats see an opening to win a rare statewide office in this reliably red state, and Democrat Destiny Wells is hitting Morales for his ties with the far-right and for wanting to limit voting options like mail-in ballots. 

Iowa

Iowa Republicans have tightened access to voting in recent years with a pair of measures that restrict mail voting, among other policies. Democratic nominee Joel Miller, who currently serves as an elections official in the state’s second most populous county, said in an interview with Bolts that he is running because he opposes those reforms and wants to “make voting easy again” in Iowa. He faults his opponent, Republican Secretary of State Paul Pate, for failing to oppose these voting restrictions. Pate is running for a third term, and the state has veered significantly to the right since his first election.

Kansas

The Big Lie split the Republican primary, with Secretary of State Scott Schwab pushing back against the former president’s conspiracies while his challenger embraced them. Schwab survived by 10 percentage points and now faces Democrat Jeanna Repass, who notes that Schwab has still supported restrictions on ballot access that she vows to fight. In this staunch red state, Democrats have not won an election for secretary of state since 1948.

Maine (via legislature) 

The Big Lie is in the air in Maine. Paul LePage, the former Republican governor who is running to regain his job back, has trumpeted unfounded suspicions of voter fraud and suggested that people were bused in from out of state to vote in Maine—conspiracist claims very similar to Trump’s. Democratic Secretary of State Shenna Bellows has pushed back, faulting him for wanting it to be harder for people to be “exercising their constitutional right to vote.” 

Whether Bellows keeps her job depends on the legislative races in November. A joint session of the legislature selects the secretary of state every two years. Although the GOP has not put a Republican in this office since it briefly seized both chambers in 2010, it has an outside shot at flipping the legislature and thus the secretary of state’s office this fall. 

Maryland (via the governor’s race)

Dan Cox, the Republican nominee for governor, is a staunch election denier who helped organize travel to Washington, D.C. on Jan. 6, 2021. If he wins the governorship, he would get to appoint a secretary of state. (Many election administration duties in Maryland are in the hands of a board of elections; but the secretary of state does sit on the board of canvassers, the body that is tasked with certifying election results.) That said, the state Senate must confirm a governor’s nominee in Maryland, and that chamber is highly likely to stay in Democratic hands. In addition, Democrat Wes Moore is heavily favored in polling and prognostications to beat Cox and to get to appoint a secretary of state himself.

Massachusetts

In his quest for a record eighth term, Secretary of State Bill Galvin has already completed the hardest step by prevailing in the contentious Democratic primary against a local NAACP leader who faulted him for not promoting ballot access proactively enough, as Bolts reported. In this blue state, the party’s nomination is typically tantamount to a general election win. 

Still, the profile of his Republican opponent keeps this on Bolts’s list of elections to watch. Rayla Campbell has closely aligned with Trump and has repeated his lies that the election was stolen. 

If Galvin prevails, keep an eye on how he shifts over his next term. After facing a progressive challenger in the 2018 primary and easily beating him, Galvin grew more supportive of pro-voter reforms such as same-day registration. 

Michigan

Republican nominee Kristina Karamo, an avowed election denier endorsed by Trump, would lead Michigan’s loose constellation of  more than 1,600 local election offices if she wins the secretary of state race. As Bolts reported, Michigan has one of the most decentralized voting systems in the country, but the secretary of state would still have the authority to issue directives and conduct audits of local offices—functions that Karamo could weaponize for her election denialist agenda if elected. Republicans have aggressively targeted election officials who resisted their effort to overturn the 2020 election in the state, and observers worry about how Karamo could further unwind the system. “It’s one thing to be feeling that heat from the outside,” David Levine, a fellow at the non-profit Alliance for Securing Democracy, told Bolts. “If the arsonist is inside the firehouse you’ve got a whole different problem.”

Karamo is trying to oust Democratic incumbent Jocelyn Benson, who oversaw the 2020 election and has defended the administration of that election—including an expansion of absentee voting—against critics. 

Minnesota

Kim Crockett, the Republican nominee, has mirrored Trump’s lies about the 2020 election. At a party convention, she aired a conspiracist video that used anti-Semitic tropes, which led to an apology by the state Republican Party’s chair. If she wins in November against Democratic incumbent Steve Simon, she would gain the power to oversee the state’s election system, which could affect the voting rights of Minnesota’s numerous immigrant communities. As the Sahan Journal previewed, Crockett has a history of making racist and anti-immigrant statements and wants to tighten voter ID restrictions, saying that non-English speaking immigrants have been “exploited for their votes.” Simon, meanwhile, wants to expand language access for voting materials.

Nebraska

Secretary of State Robert Evnen, a Republican, is running unopposed in the general election, but his primary was far more contentious. Evnen secured the GOP nomination in May with just 45 percent of the vote against two candidates who each suggested that elections have security issues and proposed restricting voting procedures; Evnen has rejected fraud allegations, and defended the state’s use of voting machines. But Evnen is also hoping that the state adopts new voter ID requirements, which Nebraskans will be voting on in a ballot measure in November. 

Nevada

Republican Jim Marchant is a lead organizer of the America First slate of secretaries of state candidates, the Trump-aligned coalition who are denying the results of the 2020 elections and laying the groundwork to intervene in 2024. Marchant is vocal about his false beliefs that the 2020 election results were illegitimate, claiming both that the presidency was stolen from Trump and that his own loss in a congressional race was due to fraud. Marchant supported the push for Nevada Republicans to send a slate of false electors to Congress in 2020, and he told The Guardian that he would be open to doing the same in 2024. “We haven’t in Nevada elected anybody since 2006,” Marchant said in January on a podcast. “They have been installed by the deep state cabal.” 

The Republican nominee also wants to end mail-in voting in the state, despite having repeatedly voted by mail in the past. 

Marchant will face Democrat Cisco Aguilar, who has portrayed himself as the sensible alternative to Marchant and his outlandish claims. Aguilar has promised to introduce policy to protect Nevada election workers against “constant harassment” they face at polling places.

New Hampshire (via legislature)

The New Hampshire legislature selects the secretary of state every two years. But despite constant flips in legislative control, lawmakers repeatedly sent Bill Gardner back to the office. Gardner, who served from 1976 until his retirement earlier this year, was a nominal Democrat who defended Republican restrictions in defiance of courts, sat on Trump’s commission to investigate voter fraud, and opposed innovations like online voter registration. His resignation in January elevated his Republican deputy, David Scanlan, to the job. Republicans are slight favorites to keep the legislature in November, though both chambers are in play.

New Mexico

Republican nominee Audrey Trujillo has built her campaign for secretary of state on the Big Lie. As a member of the America First Secretary of State Coalition alongside Nevada’s Marchant and Michigan’s Karamo, Trujillo has  also called for an end to absentee voting except for elderly, disabled, and military citizens. She has also pointed to voting machines as sources of fraud, calling on county election officials to refuse to certify the 2020 election unless a hand count was conducted, adding to the explosive context of ongoing confrontations over conservative efforts in New Mexico to block the certification of elections. 

Trujillo is running against Democratic incumbent Maggie Toulouse Oliver, who has been a vocal proponent of expanding ballot access in the state. In the current legislative session, as Bolts reported in February, Oliver rolled out a landmark package that would have expanded voter eligibility, made Election Day a holiday, and eased mail-in voting, but the package derailed in the legislature. 

New York (via the governor’s race)

This secretary of state is appointed by the governor, and does not oversee election administration. (The current office-holder is an appointee of Governor Kathy Hochul, a Democrat who is facing Republican Lee Zeldin, a member of the U.S. House who voted against approving the 2020 presidential result in Congress; the governor also appoints members of the State Board of Canvassers, who certify results, upon consultation with legislative leaders.)

North Dakota

The Republican primary was critical in this red-state open race, and it saw an easy victory by lawmaker Michael Howe over a candidate who was falsely saying the 2020 presidential result was uncertain. But Howe himself is suggesting that there are problems regarding election integrity in the state, while Democratic candidate Jeffrey Powell says the GOP’s talk of “election integrity” is “code word for voter suppression.” The office of the retiring secretary of state faced complaints and settled lawsuits over poor ballot access for Native residents.

Ohio

Former GOP lawmaker John Adams ran for secretary of state by touting the Big Lie, only to be soundly defeated by Republican incumbent Frank LaRose. But LaRose’s victory was hardly a last stand by moderate forces. He has long clashed with voting rights groups over restrictions to ballot access. In the lead-up to the 2020 election, Bolts reported in March, LaRose sided with Trump’s crusade against mail-in voting and he successfully appealed to overturn a court ruling that would have made it easier for eligible Ohioans to vote from jail.

Since then, LaRose has ramped up talk of voter fraud, secured Trump’s endorsement in his re-election bid, and floated impeaching the state’s Republican chief justice for striking down his party’s gerrymanders.

LaRose now faces Democrat Chelsea Clark, a Forest Park city councilmember, in a state that has swung red over the past decade. Clark says she would push for reforms to expand participation like automatic voter registration and reverse the state’s aggressive purge policies.

Oklahoma (via the governor’s race)

This secretary of state’s office does not oversee election administration. (The winner of the governor’s race, which features Republican incumbent Kevin Stitt, Democratic challenger Joy Hofmeister, and two other candidates, will have the power to appoint a secretary of state, who will oversee clerical functions like corporation registrations. The current office-holder is a Stitt appointee.)

Pennsylvania (via the governor’s race)

Doug Mastriano, the Trump acolyte who participated in efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election and was outside the Capitol on Jan. 6, would have the power to appoint the next secretary of state if he wins the governor’s race in November over Democratic nominee Josh Shapiro. Mastriano has repeatedly signaled he would appoint a secretary of state who shares his mindset and, as Bolts reported in July, the secretary of state could unleash chaos into the state’s system, with election observers worried primarily about the process of certifying results. A secretary of state hand-picked by Mastriano could abuse their power in 2024 by trying to refuse election results from blue-leaning counties like Allegheny (Pittsburgh) or Philadelphia. “It would be uncertain and destabilizing,” Rick Hasen, a professor at UCLA Law who specializes in election law, told Bolts.

Rhode Island

The incumbent secretary of state’s failed bid for governor opened up her office, and Democratic nominee Gregg Amore is favored to take her place in this blue-leaning state. He is a former state representative who advocated for expanding ballot access, including through sponsoring the Let Rhode Island Vote Act, which expanded mail voting and went into effect earlier this year. Amore now faces Republican Pat Cortellessa, who opposes the legislation, telling the Warwick Beacon that it endangers election security and goes too far in enabling people to vote by mail. Cortellessa also wants ballot drop boxes removed from street corners. 

South Carolina

This secretary of state’s office does not oversee election administration. (Republican incumbent Mark Hammond faces Democrat Rosemounda “Peggy” Butler.)

South Dakota

Monae Johnson’s conspiracist allegations that the state’s election system lacks integrity helped her oust Republican incumbent Steve Barnett at a party convention earlier this year. That alone makes her the favorite to become this red state’s next secretary of state. Still, Johnson has tried to erase some of her past rhetoric from her website since securing the party’s nomination, and Democratic nominee Tom Cool is attacking Republicans for threatening South Dakota’s voting systems. “They keep whining about election integrity, which we know are their code words for voter suppression,” Cool said in July. (Note that one of the roles of the secretary of state’s office in South Dakota is to oversee the ballot petition process, which has been targeted by state Republicans, as Bolts reported in June.) 

Texas (via the governor’s race)

Republican Governor Greg Abbott faces Democratic nominee and one-time U.S. Senate hopeful Beto O’Rourke, and the winner of this governor’s contest will have the power to appoint a secretary of state. Last year, Abbott picked John Scott, a lawyer who worked with the Trump campaign on a lawsuit seeking to overturn the 2020 election results in Pennsylvania. As secretary of state, Scott has defended the security of Texas’ elections against local activists who oppose the use of voting machines. O’Rourke has made it a core campaign plank to fault Abbott for championing many voter restrictions, and has pledged to ease the voter registration process and limit voter purges, some of which is handled by the secretary of state’s office. A governor’s appointee is subject to confirmation by the state Senate, which is likely to stay in Republican hands.

Vermont

By U.S. standards, Vermont is pushing the boundaries of democratic participation. The state adopted universal vote-by-mail, and some towns are now looking to allow noncitizens and 16- and 17-year olds to vote in local elections. Vermont is only one of the few places in the country that allow anyone to vote from prison. Sarah Copeland Hanzas, a state lawmaker and the Democratic nominee to take over the state’s open secretary of state office, supports these policies. She tells Bolts that, if elected, she would look for new ways to expand both ballot access and voter registration—including for incarcerated people.

Copeland Hanzas’s Republican opponent in this blue-leaning state is H. Brooke Paige, a perennial candidate who is part of the large network of GOP election deniers running for secretary of state as he echoes the former president’s lies about the 2020 election.

Washington State

Republicans have won every secretary of state election in Washington State since 1964—that’s 15 consecutive elections. But they won’t even have a candidate on the ballot this November, as the GOP was shut out of the Top 2 spots in the August all-candidate primary.

The two candidates who moved on to the runoff are Steve Hobbs, the Democratic incumbent appointed by Governor Jay Inslee in 2021 after Republican Kim Wyman resigned to take a job in the Biden administration, and Julie Anderson, the Pierce County clerk who is running as an independent. (A Republican lawmaker, Brad Klippert, is also mounting a write-in campaign.) Before becoming secretary of state, Hobbs was a moderate lawmaker who antagonized progressives in the legislature and fought some of Inslee’s priorities, a record that Inslee touted as a sign that Hobbs would be an antidote to “political polarization.” Still, Anderson is grounding her bid on the argument that a secretary of state should be nonpartisan; she also makes the case that she, unlike Hobbs, has worked in election administration for more than a decade.

Washington, D.C.

This secretary of state is appointed by the mayor, and is not involved in election administration. (Democratic Mayor Muriel Bowser is running for re-election, and she is heavily favored.)

Wisconsin

This secretary of state’s office is not involved in election administration in Wisconsin, but GOP nominee Amy Loundenbeck wants it to regain oversight over elections from the State Elections Commissions, a bipartisan agency besieged by conservative attacks since 2020. The Associated Press reports she is remaining vague about the specifics, though some GOP lawmakers have already introduced legislation to this effect. (The party would need to flip the governorship for such a bill shift to stand a chance.) Loudenbeck has said she does not believe the 2020 election results should be overturned but has echoed conspiracies about election funding, and faces Democratic incumbent Doug LaFolette, who is seeking an eleventh term.

Wyoming

Chuck Gray is the only candidate running for secretary of state, making him the only election denier who is already virtually guaranteed to win in November

Boosted by Trump’s endorsement, Gray prevailed in a competitive GOP primary over fellow lawmaker Tara Nethercott in August, and no Democrat or independent filed to run against him in November. And while Wyoming may be the least populous state in the union, his primary opponent warns to not disregard the effects that Gray’s rhetoric may have. “What happens here is certainly an example to the rest of the nation for where the country is going, and how we get caught up in perceived fears that aren’t relevant to our own communities,” Nethercott told Bolts in August. “That kind of rhetoric just continues to serve to undermine the integrity of our elections, and therefore undermines democracy.”

What about the remaining states?

Three states have no secretary of state at all (Alaska, Hawaii, and Utah). Three will elect their secretary of state in 2023 (Kentucky, Louisiana, and Mississippi). Five will elect their secretary of state in 2024 (Missouri, Montana, North Carolina, Oregon, West Virginia). Two will elect governors or lawmakers in 2024 who will then select a secretary of state (Delaware and Tennessee, as well as Puerto Rico). And two will elect governors in 2025 who could then select a secretary of state (New Jersey and Virginia).

The post Your Guide to All 35 States Deciding Their Next Secretary of State appeared first on Bolts.

The near-total ban will severely constrict the reproductive choices of Georgians on probation and parole. Residents in this category who need an abortion will be faced with an impossible choice: giving birth and caring for a baby they do not want and likely cannot afford to raise, or traveling out of state for an abortion and risking a violation of their parole or probation conditions, which could land them back in prison.

Amy Ard, the executive director of the Atlanta-based Motherhood Beyond Bars, works with expectant mothers in prison, on probation, and on parole. The organization also supports their former clients in transitioning out of prison. “I’ve talked to a few of them about the restriction on travel,” Ard said, “and how frustrating it is for them to hear you just have to go to another state, like that’s no big deal, like you get in a car and you drive to another state and stay with friends. That’s not the way it works for them. And you know, no one seems to understand that.” 

Around 666,400 women are on parole or probation at any given day in the U.S., according to a recent Prison Policy Initiative report. In Georgia, the rate of people under probation is the hightest in the nation, affecting hundreds of thousands. Around one in 25 adults are under “community supervision.”  

This stems from a law that forced judges to give the maximum sentence to people convicted of a second felony, Andrew Fleischman, an appellate lawyer at the Atlanta firm Ross & Pines, told Bolts. “What this ends up meaning is that people who have relatively minor second offenses end up getting 20 years probation,” he said. And though Georgia enacted a 2021 reform that allows people to request early termination of their probation after three years, it’s too early to tell whether that will substantially reduce these numbers. Fleischman noted that many people simply don’t have the means to challenge their probation. “If you fix the rules but don’t give people automatic counsel or an automatic hearing, it’s not always going to get fixed,” he said.

Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of Georgians are living with this sword of Damocles hanging over them. Probation’s intended status as a community alternative to incarceration is “definitely complicated by the number of people who go back to prison for violating probation,” said Page Dukes, the communications associate at the Southern Center for Human Rights. “There’s so many restrictive conditions.” And being on probation often costs more than people can afford. 

In 2015, probation revocations accounted for an astonishing 55 percent of all prison admissions in Georgia. Over 1,100 people in the state were sent back to prison for technical parole violations in 2019—just over three people a day. A 2017 Harvard Kennedy School report on probation concluded that “the largest alternative to incarceration in the United States is simultaneously one of the most significant drivers of mass incarceration.” 

Dukes spent three years on probation after serving a mandatory minimum ten-year sentence. In 2020, she filed for early release, in part so she could register to vote in time for the presidential election (people who have received a felony conviction and are on parole or probation in Georgia cannot vote). Dukes said her experience on probation was remarkably smooth, owing to her strong support system and the fact that she could afford to attend college after getting out. Still, she said, “I lived with the implicit threat of their control over my life and my movements.” Other people she knows had much worse experiences: Dukes mentioned a friend who’d been forbidden from having social media accounts as a condition of his probation. After he filed a motion under the recent reform to terminate his supervision early, probation officials searched his laptop, in what Dukes assumed was a retaliatory move, and discovered he’d watched a TikTok video. He went back to prison.

“It’s very arbitrary,” Dukes said. “Just as most other things in the criminal legal system, it very much depends on what office you’re at, what probation officer you have, what kind of caseload they have, and what kind of biases they have.”

This close monitoring and surveillance could pose specific challenges for people seeking abortions or other criminalized forms of reproductive healthcare. Some people on community supervision are forced to wear ankle bracelets that track their movement. “You are constantly drug tested,” noted Dominique Grant, the digital organizer at Women on the Rise, an organization by and for women of color who are targeted by the criminal legal system. “They have the authority and the right to show up (at your home) whenever they want to.”

“On top of everything else,” Fleischman said, people on parole and probation “typically sign Fourth Amendment waivers now,” meaning that they waive their right against being searched without a warrant. The state, he said, could conceivably wiretap your house, record you talking about a future abortion, and use it against you at a probation revocation hearing. 

People on community supervision must ask their parole or probation officer for permission to travel out of state, leaving POs with a troubling amount of discretion over the reproductive choices of their clients under the state’s newly enacted abortion ban. “You have to explain to them what you’re traveling for, how long you’re gone for, and then they now have a record of where you were,” Grant said. “If they don’t like you or if they’re the type of person that believes everyone is a criminal—it can really ruin people’s lives. I’ve seen it happen.”

“I don’t see why a PO would give you permission to go break the law,” Fleischman told Bolts. And the alternative—misrepresenting why you need to leave the state—could constitute a violation in its own right if discovered. Georgia’s Department of Community Supervision didn’t respond to queries about how its officers would handle pregnant people under supervision who want to leave the state to access abortion. 

All of this leaves Georgia’s many residents on parole and probation in an exceptionally tough position if they become pregnant. “This is a group of people who we already know are at risk for poor outcomes in general, and we don’t give them the support they need to have safe pregnancies or stable experiences of motherhood or parenthood,” said Ard with Motherhood Beyond Bars, noting that there are vanishingly few organizations in Georgia that support women on parole or probation during pregnancy. “And now we’re telling them they’ll also have no access to an abortion if pregnancy is not something that they can sustain financially, emotionally, or for any other reason.”

Right now, the women who take maternal health classes at Motherhood Beyond Bars want to be pregnant, despite the additional barriers to accessing maternal healthcare. Soon, though, Ard fears that could change. “The day that I end up with someone in my program who is (in prison) and pregnant because they tried to access a safe abortion and then were prosecuted and criminalized—that will be a very difficult day,” she told Bolts.

“We’re working with a population of people who’ve seen the worst of what society has to offer—they’ve been locked in cages and denied basic civil rights,” said Grant. “No one really feels a thousand percent surprised.” She noted that the ban is not yet in place, and that the state may enshrine protections for abortion if Stacey Abrams wins the gubernatorial election in November. “But if Brian Kemp stays, we already know the direction,” she said.

The post For Thousands of Georgians, Freely Traveling Across State Lines for an Abortion Is Not an Option appeared first on Bolts.

Kemp’s win seemed only temporary since these appointees have to face voters in 2022 to keep their jobs. Yet this spring, as the delayed elections finally occur for both high court seats, LaGrua and McMillian will face zero opposition because nobody filed to run against them by the March 11 deadline. They are now guaranteed full six-year terms, on a court that has final say on issues ranging from election law to the death penalty. 

Barrow says the prospect of experiencing what he went through is chilling potential candidates’ interest in running. 

“Anybody who is thinking about running has to run the risk that they pull out the rug from under you,” he told Bolts. 

Andrew Fleischman, a criminal defense attorney in Atlanta, says he has also observed this fear. “People are reluctant to run because you can be ahead and still have your election canceled,” Fleischman told Bolts. “Imagine putting your families through that, taking time off, being on track to winning, and the governor can just stop you whenever he feels like it.”

Georgia law already provided a path for state officials to game the rules before 2020. When an appellate court judge resigned within the six months before an already scheduled election for their seat, the governor appointed someone to the seat and the election was postponed to the next cycle. The practice fits into a long nationwide tradition of incumbents tendering suspiciously timed resignations before an election to install a preferred successor and circumvent the will of voters.

But the dynamic dramatically escalated in 2020. Georgia Republicans established that judges do not even have to vacate their seats before their elections to get them canceled. 

Justice Keith Blackwell was set to face Barrow in June when he announced, in the run-up to that election, that he would resign in November—five months after voters were set to decide between Barrow and him, and just one month before his term was set to end anyway. (Had Blackwell not sought re-election and served out those final weeks instead of resigning, the June election would have proceeded normally, just without an incumbent.) Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger then canceled the election as though there was a vacancy, and the state supreme court rejected Barrow’s lawsuit to force an election in a 6-2 ruling.

The pattern has repeated over the past few months. Chief Justice David Nahmias, who wrote the 2020 opinion authorizing this maneuver, and Fulton County Superior Court Chief Judge Christopher Brasher, were meant to be on the ballot in May. Both recently announced that they would retire later this year, after the scheduled election—once again postponing elections and allowing Kemp’s appointments to rule until 2024.

Critics fear the stage has been set for things to get worse. The dissent in the 2020 case warned that nothing in state law seems to prevent judges from rescinding their resignations after the date of a canceled election, leading to a perverse situation where a judge’s promise to vacate their seat could buy them extra years on the bench. The ruling also raised the possibility that, if a justice lost an election and then resigned in the lame-duck period between the election and the end of their term, the governor’s appointment could preempt the election’s result and install a different judge than the election’s winner.

Barrow calls this prospect “dysfunctional or dystopian.” Judicial candidates now must “gamble” that an election will happen, he says, and even if it does, and if they win, “there’s no guarantee.”

The latest in Georgia’s democracy crisis points to a larger pattern that belies the state’s supposedly democratic way of choosing judges. While state and local elections often go uncontested, Georgia’s high court judges are almost never challenged. As Bolts noted in early February, Georgia saw 12 consecutive supreme court elections that only drew one candidate between 2012 and 2018.

“If you don’t have an opponent, you have no incentive to talk about your position, talk about your ethics, and communicate what you do and don’t stand for,” says Alexandra Joseph, co-founder of Informed Georgians for Justice, an organization that closely follows how local officials affect the criminal legal system. “Judges in Georgia, but also nationwide, have stepped away from the public square aspect of elections.”

Verda Colvin is the only state supreme court justice up for re-election this year who faces an opponent. Colvin, who was also appointed by Kemp in 2021, will face Veronica Brinson, a Macon lawyer, in May.

Judicial elections are nonpartisan in Georgia, though in many states that does not stop parties from organizing around them, and Democratic wins in 2020 and 2021 seemed to herald a new era of political competition in Georgia. The state Democratic Party did not respond to a request for comment on whether it tries to recruit candidates for judicial office.

Georgia’s supreme court rarely grabs national headlines like its hyper-divided counterparts in states like North Carolina and Wisconsin, but it regularly issues decisions that greatly affect public policy in the state. 

Last year, the court upheld an exceptionally high threshold that death penalty attorneys say makes it all but impossible to stop the execution of people with intellectual disabilities. In another case last week, the court made it harder for defendants to recover if their attorney messes up and misses a deadline to file a petition. They will now have to go through the more burdensome habeas process, during which they are entitled to less legal assistance. “If your lawyer misses a deadline by a day, you’ve basically lost the right to an appointed counsel for your appeal through no fault of your own,” said Fleischman, warning of “massive negative effects.” 

“You can see the wings of the court playing out if you read that opinion,” Fleischman added. Justices Nels Peterson, John Ellington, and Charlie Bethel dissented in that case, and they have a record that is more amenable to defendants’ rights in criminal cases. Bethel was the only justice who dissented in the earlier death penalty case.

Peterson and Bethel are appointees of former Governor Nathan Deal. In both the 2021 death penalty case and last week’s habeas case, all of Kemp’s appointees were in the majority. While Deal and Kemp are both Republicans, their administrations are markedly different on criminal justice. Deal championed criminal justice reforms meant to lower incarceration, while Kemp has pushed for tougher laws and for weakening public defenders. 

Georgia’s court system also suffered a considerable loss of oversight in 2016 when a former judge who had moved to the legislature mounted a successful campaign to gut the state’s independent agency that monitored judges. The lawmaker had himself been investigated by the state’s independent agency while he was on the bench. Judges have since been far more free to act as they please without feeling consequence. 

“If we don’t have a judicial watchdog organization, then ALL we have are elections,” said Joseph. She is concerned that the lack of contested elections is compounding that lack of oversight and the insular nature of the profession. She believes a more robust democratic debate would enable more diverse voices to be heard and possibly elevated to the bench, including public defenders, who are currently absent from the state supreme court, but that as it stands it’s the same voices that prevail.

“These elections are viewed as not contestable, like it’s almost rude to run. It’s just not done. It’s not proper. And I think that that misconception is stifling what the court actually could be,” Joseph said. “Lawyers as a profession is the ultimate old boys’ club.”

The post “Dystopian” Loophole for Georgia Judicial Elections Gives Brian Kemp the Last Laugh appeared first on Bolts.

Among other measures, her office will stop prosecuting people for simple possession of marijuana, decline to prosecute or divert other low-level drug possession cases, and limit charges that carry mandatory minimum sentences. Gonzalez also rules out ever seeking the death penalty. 

Some of the most important transformations, though, concern probation, an issue that is particularly significant in Georgia: The state has the highest population of people on probation in the country, with more than 400,000 individuals under community supervision in 2018.

Gonzalez’s memo aims to significantly reduce probation; it lays out plans to avoid charging people for technical violations of probation, and to shorten probation terms. 

“Probation is this back door into incarceration,” Gonzalez told The Appeal: Political Report. “We [prosecutors] have the power and authority to make many of those fixes that are part of the problem and the causes of mass incarceration … we want to hold people accountable, but we want to do it in a humane way.”

Gonzalez joins a growing wave of progressives who are taking over DA offices. Last year, reform-minded prosecutor candidates won elections in New Orleans, Los Angeles, and Austin, Texas, among other places. Now, some are quickly enacting the policies they championed on the campaign trail. This week, Eli Savit, the newly elected prosecutor of Washtenaw County, Michigan (Ann Arbor) announced his office would not seek cash bail. In December, George Gascón, the new DA of Los Angeles County, set forth a wide-ranging slate of reforms.

In Athens, Gonzalez’s victory is the latest in a string of progressive wins for local offices. A groundswell of grassroots organizing has helped elect progressive candidates to local office and made criminal justice reform a focal point.

Gonzalez says she was inspired to address probation after meeting with members of the Athens Reentry Collaborative, a community of individuals affected by incarceration and the criminal legal system. She learned that though probation was an alternative to incarceration, it still burdens people with surveillance, bills, and stigma. 

“They’re not incarcerated, but [probation] can affect their ability to get a job, it can affect their ability to get a school loan, or even be accepted into certain schools,” Gonzalez said. “Probation affects whether they can get their kids back, if they lost custody, because they’re still technically serving [a sentence], even though they’re free.”

In its original conception, probation “was meant to be rehabilitative in the sense that folks on probation were to be given the opportunity to change their behavior and reform their lives without having their liberty deprived of them,” said Sarah Shannon, a University of Georgia sociology professor and one of the coordinators of the collaborative.

But that’s not the reality, Shannon said. People on probation talk about its “many hoops” as “almost being double or triple punishment,” she added. 

The rules of probation can be onerous, requiring weekly meetings with officers, drug testing, and other forms of surveillance and monitoring. Many of these requirements come with costs, on top of a standard, monthly probation fee. Probation officers can choose to waive the monthly fees, but other costs brought on by the terms of probation—like ankle monitoring services and drug tests—can add up.

“If you are sentenced to an anger management or family violence class, those fees are up to you,” said Shannon. “So your inability to pay for those things may mean that you can’t successfully complete your probation.” 

Simple violations of such probation terms, like missing a bill or an appointment, could result in jail time––what probation sentences arguably seek to avoid. 

“So when you think about the number of conditions that you have to meet, then that’s the number of opportunities that you have to fail, and therefore end up for a long period of time being vulnerable to being incarcerated anyway,” Shannon said.

Many counties handle misdemeanor probation through private companies like Sentinel Offender Services. This was part of a larger push within Georgia, starting in the 1990s, to trim local budgets by outsourcing misdemeanor probation management. But it created a profit motive that can lead to probation companies neglecting the rights of indigent defendants. 

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that probation generally cannot be revoked, resulting in incarceration, if an individual is unable to pay their fines and fees despite attempting to do so. However, there is no statewide standard for poverty in these cases and many courts delegate that determination to probation companies. Recent lawsuits in Georgia found that Sentinel threatened to jail indigent probationers for their inability to pay, and it unlawfully collected fees.

Though private companies don’t handle misdemeanor probation in Athens-Clarke or Oconee counties, there’s still a problem of technical probation violations landing people in jail. Gonzalez has purview over misdemeanor probation in Oconee (in Athens-Clarke it’s the responsibility of a Solicitor General), and she wants to avoid revoking probation for technical violations—like failed drug tests or failure to pay fees. She also wants to build on existing efforts to bring down the cost of probation; for example, judges have set up a fund to offset the financial burden for people on probation.

Gonzalez also will cap probation at two or three years, depending on the circumstances. 

Georgia not only has the largest number of people on probation, it also has the longest probation sentences, with an average of more than six years in 2016. More than one-third of people on probation serve sentences longer than 10 years. 

“What we see with these extremely long probation sentences is that it is more punitive than anything,” Gonzalez said. She said it’s possible for someone sentenced to 10 years on probation to complete nine years without incident, commit a technical violation in the last year, and go to prison for a decade. 

Gonzalez’s new policies of not prosecuting marijuana possession and some low-level drug possession cases would also reduce the number of people who receive probation terms in the first place. Marijuana arrests have disproportionately targeted Black residents in Athens.

Gonzalez’s path to the prosecutor’s office was a rocky one. She was elected despite Governor Brian Kemp’s attempts to cancel last year’s DA election for Athens-Clarke and Oconee counties, which would have effectively ensured that the interim DA, Democrat Brian Patterson, could stay in office for another two years. Gonzalez sued Kemp, resulting in a unanimous decision from the Georgia Supreme Court upholding the need for an election.

Gonzalez’s success is emblematic of local politics in Athens, which has seen a rising tide of progressivism. In 2014, Tim Denson, an activist in the Occupy Movement, ran for mayor on promises to cut the city’s poverty rate in half and provide free bus service and affordable child care. Though he didn’t win, Denson went on to form a political group called Athens For Everyone, which, along with other groups like the Athens Anti-Discrimination Movement, has become a force shaping local government.

In 2018, Athens for Everyone helped get six progressive candidates, including Denson, elected to seats on the Athens-Clarke County Commission, and also endorsed Kelly Girtz, who won the mayoral race. These candidates have largely championed policies to address racial inequity, climate change, living wages, affordable housing, and criminal justice reform. 

Commissioner Mariah Parker, who made national news when she was sworn in on “The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” was instrumental in passing a measure last year that ended cash bail for violations of local ordinances. She and Denson have also pushed to decriminalize marijuana and end the use of unpaid jail labor. These measures have the support of the new Athens sheriff, John Williams, who was also elected in 2020 after ousting an incumbent in the Democratic primary on promises of not accepting donations from the bail bonds industry and ending cooperation with ICE. 

Erin Stacer, president of Athens for Everyone, says these progressive wins were the product of years of work by local activists. “It was really the organizers around town who engaged people in a way that got them … to start realizing that there is a local government and that they have a say,” she said.

“This is about human lives,” she added. “This is about changing people and changing our systems, so that we do not destroy people, but rather look at them as part of our society.”

The post New D.A. Commits to Fixing Georgia’s ‘Backdoor to Incarceration’ appeared first on Bolts.

Growing up in Gwinnett County, Georgia, in the northeastern Atlanta suburbs, Jonathan Zuñiga remembers the fear his parents felt driving to the grocery store.

In 2009, the Gwinnett County sheriff’s office, under Sheriff Butch Conway, started turning over hundreds of Latinx immigrants in its custody to ICE—including many who only landed in jail after police arrested them for minor traffic violations. Zuñiga says his parents, who are undocumented immigrants from Mexico, had to leave their construction jobs for lower-paying factory jobs that required less driving. But running errands continued to pose a threat.

“Driving even small amounts of time was unsafe,” Zuñiga said.

The county sheriff’s office was making these transfers because it had joined ICE’s 287(g) program, which allows local officers to directly enforce federal immigration policies, including screening immigration status and detaining residents until ICE takes custody. Gwinnett County operates one of the largest 287(g) programs in the country: this year, it ranks fourth in the nation for the number of ICE detainer requests, in which local jails hold people in custody longer in order to hand them over to federal agents. Detainers in Gwinnett peaked in 2012 and then steadily declined throughout Barack Obama’s second term as president. But they soared again after Donald Trump took office in early 2017 with new enforcement priorities, including having ICE arrest noncitizens more frequently for minor crimes. A Mother Jones investigation found that between 2017 and July 2019, the primary charge for nearly half of the people held for ICE at the Gwinnett County Jail was for driving without a license or another minor traffic violation.

But in November, voters in Gwinnett and nearby suburban Cobb County chose Democratic sheriffs for the first time in decades, electing candidates who made campaign promises to end the 287(g) programs. A Democratic candidate who opposed 287(g) also won in Charleston County, South Carolina; altogether these wins mirror a string of progressive sheriff victories in 2018 that were driven by immigration issues.

Cobb County’s longtime sheriff, Neil Warren, lost to challenger Craig Owens. In Gwinnett County, Sheriff-elect Keybo Taylor won with 57 percent of the vote against Republican candidate Lou Solis, the second-in-command to Conway, who didn’t seek re-election. In 2016, by contrast, Conway ran unopposed and won 97 percent of the vote.

That upset, and the emphasis on 287(g) as a central campaign issue in both counties, resulted in large part from the work of local immigrants’ rights organizers who have grown their operations under the Trump presidency and activated communities of color. Their organizing also contributed to Georgia electing a Democrat presidential candidate for the first time since 1992. 

Leading up to the November elections, Zuñiga joined Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights (GLAHR) Action Network as a canvasser focused on the sheriff races in Gwinnett and Cobb counties. Working as part of the “Take Action, Get Power” coalition with Southerners on New Ground (SONG) Power, and Mijente, Zuñiga and other canvassers were able to reach more than 125,000 residences—primarily Latinx and Black voters—by door-knocking (with COVID-19 precautions), according to GLAHR. Their work paralleled groups like the Asian American Advocacy Fund, whose outreach helped to nearly double voter turnout among Asian American and Pacific Islander communities.

Zuñiga found that many residents were aware of 287(g) but not of how to change it. “They didn’t know the formal name of that policy, but they knew what could happen if [you didn’t have] a license,” he said. “A lot of people thought it was something coming down from the federal level. They weren’t aware that changing a sheriff could actually change that policy.”

Founded nearly 15 years ago, GLAHR is the largest Latinx grassroots organization in the state. Under the Trump administration, GLAHR, SONG, and other long-established Georgia-based nonprofits have joined a nationwide trend of changing liberal activism by creating 501(c)(4) arms—organizations that are also exempt from federal income tax but can lobby and do political work—in order to be more aggressive political players, rather than solely focused on litigation, educational work, or providing services.

Kevin Joachin, an organizer with GLAHR Action Network, says the organization’s priority has become “building the political consciousness of our community”—helping inform Latinx residents about specific policies and their ability to change them at a scale that has little precedence in Georgia, particularly for a down-ballot race. That organizing began early in the election cycle; GLAHR lead organizer Carlos Medina says that activating Latinx voters for the sheriff primaries helped push Democratic candidates in both counties leftward, leading to promises to end the 287(g) program.

Zuñiga says he found that many Latinx and Black voters in the suburbs—particularly in the more rural areas of Cobb and Gwinnett counties—never before had an interaction with a canvasser, despite the influx of political spending and organizing that’s accompanied Georgia’s demographic change in recent years. “We try to get that small, little conversation with people because we feel like that actually matters,” Zuñiga said. 

Although Hillary Clinton won Gwinnett County in the 2016 presidential election, and Joe Biden won the county and state this year, more than a third of Latinxes in Georgia voted for Trump, according to exit polls. Canvassers with Take Action Get Power found that some Latinx voters in Gwinnett supported Solis for sheriff partially because of his Latinx identity. Joachin says GLAHR Action Network’s in-person approach was pivotal: Canvassers would see pro-Solis signs in some stores and talk to the owners or employees about Gwinnett’s high rates of deportations. The next time canvassers drove by, Joachin said, the signs were gone. Compared to hyperpolarized debates about presidential candidates, Zuñiga says he was able to have “more in-touch conversations [about the sheriff’s race] because it was something that was affecting their communities, and they could see that firsthand.”

SONG volunteer coordinator Tayleece Paul says door-knocking yielded contact or conversations with 32 percent of residences, versus just 2 percent with phone banking. Paul grew up in Gwinnett County and remembers a friend’s father who was deported through the 287(g) program. Many of the coalition’s canvassers met people who had similar experiences with the program, she says. “Each person had their own unique story.”

Joachin says that engaging the entire Latinx community—including those who cannot vote, like undocumented immigrants—is central to GLAHR Action Network’s strategy of empowerment. “We’re not always concerned if the person who we’re looking for is at home, because maybe their family member who is undocumented will benefit from the conversation by being included,” he said. “We’re not telling them to vote—that’s voter fraud—but what we’re doing is creating a culture of voting.”

Along with teenage and college-age Latinx people, who’ve become politically engaged around issues that affect their parents or family, undocumented community members in Gwinnett and Cobb have influenced the votes of others in their families or neighborhoods, and they’ve joined the movement as organizers. Gwinnett has an estimated 69,000 undocumented immigrants, and Cobb has a little more than half that, according to estimates from the Migration Policy Institute based on federal census data. “What definitely needs to be considered is the powerhouse that is the undocumented community mobilizing,” Joachin said.

For GLAHR Action Network, the focus now turns to ensuring the new sheriffs follow through with their promises to end cooperation agreements with ICE, and watching next year’s legislative session to see what kind of blowback from the Republican-controlled state legislature might emerge.

There’s also more that the sheriffs could do to stop cooperating with ICE. Even without 287(g) on the books, ICE can request detainers, seek access to jails, and rent detention space in collaboration with local sheriffs. Both Owens and Taylor have said they won’t work with ICE in those ways, though Taylor also told the Appeal in September that, if elected, his office would cooperate with ICE in cases involving “major crimes.” Medina says that GLAHR will be working to hold both sheriff’s offices accountable. “We’re also a lot more powerful now. I think no one can deny that,” Joachin said. “We’re going to be continuing to build power at the local level, knowing that ICE will still be in these areas, regardless if the county departments are collaborating with [them].”

Now, GLAHR is canvassing for the two U.S. Senate runoffs happening in Georgia next month. Joachin says it’s important to make sure the Biden administration’s immigration plans “don’t just involve negotiating with Republicans.”

“We need our demands to be fully heard, which is putting a moratorium on deportations and family separation, reuniting families and keeping them outside of detention, abolishing ICE,” he said. “We know from having these conversations with people at the doors that people are tired of compromise, of only having crumbs given to the community. … We can’t negotiate our parents, and we can’t negotiate our lives.”

Paul echoes the need for continuing to raise awareness about specific policies that sheriffs can change or influence. Beyond 287(g), the use of cash bail in pretrial detention and the criminalization of petty charges are on her list. “It’s not just about electing a new sheriff so that 287(g) can go away, because there’s still going to be a lot of atrocities that continue to happen so long as these policies stay in place,” she said.

Zuñiga believes the recent demonstration of Latinx organizing power is here to stay. “That comes down to people here actually living the experience of knowing what it’s like to be pulled over, and how immigration actually works here in the state,” he said. “You’re not just voting for what’s best for you and your family. You’re also voting for what’s best for your community.”

The post How Immigrant Communities Beat Back ICE and Helped Flip Georgia appeared first on Bolts.