Lawmakers want Secretary of State removed form State Elections Board

Some Georgia lawmakers are trying to remove the Secretary of State from the State Elections Board and want to give that board the authority to investigate him.

The Secretary of State’s Office insists such a move is unconstitutional.

At a hearing Wednesday, Sylvania state Sen. Max Burns said he wanted to boot Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger off the state elections board three years after lawmakers demoted him as chair of that board.

“There’s really no reason for the secretary of state to maintain an ex-officio position,” Burns said.

Bow, Burns wants to give that board oversight over Raffensperger’s office and the ability to open full investigations into it.

“All agencies of state government need reasonable oversight and right now, we believe that the State Elections Board is the proper venue to have that responsibility.

But the Secretary of State’s general counsel says not so fast.

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In a letter to Burns, she insists, “There are several significant legal problems” with SB 358 and that it would “violate the Georgia constitution if enacted.”

This is a continuation of an issue that started after the 2020 presidential election when Raffensperger refused to go along with then-president Donald Trump’s false claims of voter fraud.

The bill passed out of the Senate ethics committee right along party lines.

Savannah state Sen. Derek Mallow voted against it, also believing it’s unconstitutional to have an appointed board authority over a constitutional officer.

“They say Conservative principle. They want smaller government, but this is expanding government, that you are creating another oversight to a constitutional officer elected by the majority votes in the state. I don’t quite understand the logic in that. That’s double talk,” Mallow said.

That ethics committee also approved a bill that would ban ranked choice voting, something many voting experts believe could eliminate costly runoff elections.

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