ATLANTA, GA: During an interview Wednesday, April 1, Georgia House Speaker David Ralston (R-Blue Ridge) admitted he opposed widespread voting by mail because it would hurt Republican candidates. Ralston said, “This will be extremely devastating to Republicans and conservatives in Georgia. Every registered voter is going to get one of these. … This will certainly drive up turnout.”
Sarah Riggs Amico, candidate for U.S. Senate, released the following statement in response:
“Speaker Ralson is admitting out loud what we’ve always known: that expanding opportunities to vote, including by mail, gives more Georgians the opportunity to vote for candidates who stand up for working families instead of wealthy special interests. It’s why continuing the tradition of voter suppression is treated as a higher priority by elected Republicans than ensuring eligible voters can exercise their constitutional rights. But voters have an antidote to such tactics, and that’s the kind of explosive turnout Republican leaders are so afraid of, and that we’re seeing this election cycle. They should, in fact, be worried.”
Speaker Ralston’s remarks come on the heels of President Donald Trump’s similar admission earlier this week that GOP-led voter suppression tactics are intended to keep Republicans in power and prevent Democrats from winning elections. He told “Fox and Friends” on March 31 that Democrats’ election security proposals “had things, levels of voting that if you’d ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”