Another Elections Bill from Representatives Scott (153rd) and Yates (73rd)!

Hey Kids,

If Senator Shafer's bill wasn't enough to stir the puddin', there's another bill that's been introduced over at the House of Representatives that drags a blender into the mix. This rascal modifies 31 parts of Chapter 2 of Title 21, some pretty interesting, some not so much. It's gonna take a couple of days to digest the whole thing but a couple sections do stand out.

Section 11 of the bill reduces the number of write in candidates required to trigger an election if the incumbent has no challenger on the ballot from two to one. That's important in Georgia due to the fact that most of our august members of the State House and Senate do not have an opponent on the ballot in most years. In 2008, of the 181 seats up for election, 140 sitting members of the legislature were the only candidates on the ballot for their races. Senator Shafer's bill could fix that by opening up more races with lower petitioning requirements.

Section 19 makes it OK to conduct exit polling with 25' of the building where voting is taking place whereas the current law requires exit polling to be at least 150' feet from the building. Evidently exit pollsters want to be closer to their prey or perhaps there is a correlation between distance traveled from the polling place and the ability of the voter to recall his or her choices. The same section also reduces the distance requirements for petitioning at polling places as well.

You can take a gander at the whole thing by clicking the title of this post and heading over to the Georgia General Assembly website, but before you do, slide over to the sidebar and spend some our your least favorite politicians money by clicking on the one of their ads. It's the easy and fun thing to do to impact politics in Georgia!