Georgia’s new voting law will make absentee voting harder and create restrictions and complications for those casting ballots in booming urban and suburban counties, home to many Democratic voters. An analysis by the New York Times has identified 16 provisions that hamper the right to vote for some Georgians or strip power from state and local elections officials and give it to legislators. The new law includes a provision that makes it a crime to offer water to voters waiting in lines, which tend to be longer in densely populated communities. Georgia has also cut by more than half the period during which voters may request an absentee ballot, from nearly six months before an election to less than three. The controversial law comes in the wake of the first Democratic victories in presidential and Senate elections in Georgia in a generation. President Biden won the state by just 11,779 votes out of nearly five million cast.
