Just over a year after one of the most talked-about elections in recent history, one organization has ranked Georgia's election laws as the most secure in the country.
The Heritage Foundation released an "Election Security Scorecard" on their website, showing the state ranking first among all states and the District of Columbia.
John Malcolm, vice president of the Institute for Constitutional Government and the director of the Meese Center for Legal & Judicial Studies, joined WDUN's "Newsroom" with Mitch Clarke last Monday and said Georgia's laws on voter identification and accuracy of voter registration lists. He also said, however, that the state has room to improve.
"They don't allow state legislators or citizens to challenge election officials if they unilaterally change laws, so they got zero out of three on that point," Malcolm said. "They don't have any restrictions on automatic registration, so Georgians can go to the DMV and they'll automatically register you to vote. That creates all sorts of vulnerabilities for ineligible voters who show up at the DMV."
Malcolm was asked about some of the more controversial aspects of the last election, including drop boxes which State Senator and Lt. Governor candidate Butch Miller, R-Gainesville, has proposed banning.
"If you have drop boxes in post offices or places like federal facilities that are monitored and you keep cameras on the drop boxes, if you limit the number of ballots that you can put into drop boxes at any one time (you can have secure drop boxes)," Malcolm said.
Malcolm said he and The Heritage Foundation support more secure election laws and are hoping to use the scorecard to encourage more stringent laws.
"The purpose of this is not to make it really difficult for people to vote, although we are accused for being vote suppressors, the idea here is to make it easy for eligible people to vote and hard for people to cheat and make it easier to catch them if in fact they do cheat," Malcolm said.
To hear the full interview with John Malcolm about Georgia's election laws, click play on the audio above.
