Republicans ask Georgia high court to halt Saturday voting in US Senate runoff
People cast their ballot during the Midterm Elections at Fox Theatre on November 8 in Atlanta
By Fredreka Schouten, CNN
Three Republican party committees on Tuesday asked the Georgia Supreme Court to halt Saturday early voting in the US Senate runoff.
The petition — filed by the Republican National Committee, the Georgia Republican Party and the Republicans’ Senate campaign arm — asks the state’s high court to issue an emergency stay to block counties from offering voters the opportunity to cast ballots on the Saturday after Thanksgiving.
In their petition, the Republican committees argue that only 10 counties — “all of them Democratic-leaning” — plan to conduct early voting that day, “eviscerating the statutorily required uniformity among Georgia’s counties.”
Allowing a lower court ruling that permits Saturday voting to stand creates “an unequal system, where some counties will vote on November 26 and others will not,” lawyers for the GOP committees wrote.
Tuesday’s filing is the latest legal twist in the high-profile, December 6 runoff election between Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock and Republican challenger Herschel Walker.
The new court petition comes a day after an appeals judge — in a victory for Warnock and Democrats — denied the state’s appeal of a lower court ruling that had allowed voting on the Saturday after a holiday.
In their Tuesday petition to the state’s high court, the Republican committees said two counties are having trouble staffing polling locations on Saturday, and many others are occupied with other tasks, such as testing and setting up machines for use in the runoff.
The time-crunch election workers now face can be traced back to the controversial 2021 election law passed by the Republican-controlled Georgia legislature, which cut the time allowed for a runoff from nine weeks to four.
Opponents of allowing early voting on this upcoming Saturday argue it violates a state law prohibiting voting on Saturday if there is a state holiday on the Thursday or Friday before.
The suit that originally pushed for Saturday voting had been brought by Warnock’s campaign, along with the Georgia Democratic Party and Democrats’ Senate campaign arm. They argued that the state law did not apply to runoffs.
Earlier Tuesday, voting rights advocates praised the lower court rulings that allowed Saturday balloting and publicly implored all 159 counties in the state to offer voting that day and to extend their hours on every early voting day. They said restricting advance voting could disenfranchise working-class Georgians.
“With this new appeal … voters’ right to the ballot box is in jeopardy again,” Stephanie Ali, policy director of the New Georgia Project, said of the GOP’s emergency petition.
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