Georgia House Speaker David Ralston (R) said the quiet part out loud Wednesday, bashing the secretary of state’s move to mail out absentee ballot applications to the state’s registered voters because the higher voter participation “will be extremely devastating to Republicans and conservatives in Georgia.”
“Every registered voter is going to get one of these,” he added in an interview with FetchYourNews, a local news site. “This will certainly drive up turnout.”
Ralston echoed President Donald Trump in his sentiments, who Monday aired a similar fear about Democratic proposals like increasing vote by mail and same-day registration.
“The things they had in there were crazy,” Trump said on “Fox and Friends.” “They had things — levels of voting that, if you ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”
Ralston, joined by U.S. Republican Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, has been urging Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to delay the Georgia primary, scheduled for May 19, amid the coronavirus pandemic. Raffensperger, who already delayed the primary once, said he doesn’t have the authority to push it back further, per the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Democrats are calling for the election to go on as planned, but want the government to pay for postage on the absentee ballots.
Gov. Brian Kemp (R) also said that he lacks the power to move the election. He plans to institute a shelter-in-place order Thursday as the number of cases in the state has grown to 4,748, according to the Georgia Department of Public Health.
