If people vote, Republicans lose

Last week, [Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R)] announced the state would be mailing absentee ballot request forms to its nearly 7 million voters “in an effort to allow as many Georgia voters as possible to exercise their right to vote without leaving their homes.”

The move came a week after the state postponed its presidential primary from March 24 until May 19, as officials nationwide have urged the public to stay indoors as much as possible and to avoid large gatherings in a bid to mitigate the spread of COVID-19.

During an interview released on Wednesday, [Georgia state House Speaker David Ralston (R)] was asked about concerns he had regarding Raffensperger’s move.

[...]

Ralston said one of his main problems with the mass-scale voting effort were the possibility of fraud. He also pointed to concerns he thinks voters may have about “breaches of security systems and data systems.”

[...]

“So, here, you know, the process keeps going up and up and up and so a multitude of reasons why vote by mail in my view is not acceptable,” Ralston went on, before adding “the president said it best, this will be extremely devastating to Republicans and conservatives in Georgia.”

Ralston was referring to comments Trump made earlier this week about the vote-by-mail proposal that was included in the original House version of the coronavirus relief legislation that was backed by Democrats.

"The things they had in there were crazy. They had things, levels of voting that if you ever agreed to, you would never have a Republican elected in this country again," Trump said in an interview on "Fox & Friends” on Monday.

[...]

When discussing the vote-by-mail effort in Georgia, Ralston said, “This will be the first time we have had this and it's going to be every registered voter in Georgia.”

“Let me emphasize,” he continued. “Let me say that again, every registered voter is going to get one of these. Now, I ask you, because I know you keep up with this, what was the turnout in the primary back in to 2018 or 2016?”

“Was it 100 percent?” Ralston asked. “No. It’s way, way, way lower and so, you know, this is going to, this will certainly drive up turnout.”

[...]

At an earlier point in the interview, when discussing the vote-by-mail effort in Georgia, Ralston said he thinks that it should instead be in the “purview of the legislative branch where members of the state House and state Senate” to “consider and debate and discuss and vet these things and then decide if that's going to be the policy of this state.”

“But to simply have this become an administrative decision made apparently on the fly during this crisis, to me, is just a — is very, very unwise and it's poor policy,” he added.

  The Hill

The Republican-controlled legislature should decide who gets to vote in Georgia.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.