Georgia’s newest election law “cures a lot of the problems” seen in the 2020 election, said Gov. Brian Kemp (R-GA) on Monday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with host Alex Marlow, author of Breaking the News: Exposing the Establishment Media’s Hidden Deals and Secret Corruption.
Kemp remarked, “The nuts and bolts of [the law] are this, it makes it easy to vote and hard to cheat. The biggest — probably the top four things to me — is it replaces a signature match with a voter ID on absentee ballots. It secures ballot drop boxes around the clock. It also requires poll workers to continue tabulating ballots until all votes are counted and then it actually — contrary to what the national media and those that are profiting off of this whole exercise of not being truthful with people — expands voting access, especially on the weekends.”
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Marlow asked about left-wing news media reports framing Georgia’s election law as a denial of water donations to voters at polling stations.
CNN declared, “It’s now illegal in Georgia to give food and water to voters in line.” The Washington Post echoed the same narrative in a column titled, “Opinion: Georgia Republicans’ ban on giving voters water epitomizes the GOP’s disturbing priorities.”
Kemp responded, “Basically, [the bill] bans private funding for elections and secures the precinct areas against non-voting activities, so that voters that are within 150 feet of the polling location … can’t be intimidated or bothered while they’re standing in line. It doesn’t prevent the county elections offices from having a water cooler.”
Kemp continued, “It just keeps the NRA or Sierra Club or whatever special interest group — [and] people that are running for office — from handing out food or water in the line, so it’s not as outrageous as people are making it out to be. And outside that 150 feet, if campaigns want to wave signs, if they want to set up tables, hand out water or whatever, they can certainly do that.”
Marlow said he has witnessed intimidation attempts at polling station lineups.
“I have had some very aggressive people very close to the polls trying to influence my vote,” he shared. “I’m sure many people the audience have experienced that. We have an editor who ran for Congress about ten years or so ago, and his opponent, who won, was giving out candy at the polls. … Water is, of course, very innocuous, but you can see the slippery slope getting out of control pretty quickly.”
Drop boxes for ballots, which Kemp said were introduced last year as a public health measure in Georgia, would now be monitored and shielded from non-governmental funding. In 2020, Mark Zuckerberg spent $400 million on an operation — which was praised by left-wing media as a security measure — to fund ballot drop boxes in various localities.
Kemp said, “If you look at some of the national stories about drop boxes, you’d think that we were just loading them all up in a truck [to] junk them, when drop boxes were never even allowed in our state before [the 2020] election, and the only reason they were done this election was was because of a public health state of emergency and a worldwide pandemic and an emergency order that the state elections board did.”
“We’re putting [drop boxes] into the law,” he continued. “Now, every county has to have a drop box. You had some counties last election that didn’t even have a drop box. Now they’re going to be mandated to have one, but yes, we’re securing [the drop boxes] 24 hours a day to make sure that you don’t have people dumping ballots in them at inappropriate times, and the left is making that out like we’re taking something away.”
Kemp remarked, “Looking back, the drop boxes were a concern for people because they were supposed to be secured with cameras 24 hours a day. That did not happen in some counties.”
Kemp described reforms to absentee voting in Georgia, which now require absentee voters to verify their identities with driver’s licenses or other documentation. Absentee ballots cast last year were verified through signature comparisons and did not require voter ID.
Election officials were “overwhelmed” by absentee ballots and the signature verification process in 2020, Kemp said.
He added, “Everybody is just having a fit about [voter ID requirements for absentee voting], at least the left and the national media. But really the county elections officials I’ve talked to, they like the idea of the federal ID — or putting the numbers of your driver’s license or your free voter ID you can get in Georgia [on your absentee ballot], because it’ll help them speed up the process.”
The bill “cures a lot of the problems that we saw in the last election,” Kemp concluded.