Georgia Politics, Campaigns, and Elections for July 31, 2024

On July 31, 1777, the Marquis de LaFayette was commissioned a Major General in the Continental Army, serving without pay.

The cornerstone for the first United States Mint was laid in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on July 31, 1792, becoming the first building constructed by the federal government under the Constitution.

Former President Andrew Johnson, who succeeded President Lincoln upon his assassination and oversaw much of the post-Civil War Reconstruction era, died of a stroke in Tennessee on July 31, 1875.

On July 31, 1906, a bill to place a Constitutional Amendment on the November election for voters to decide whether to create an intermediate-level Georgia Court of Appeals was approved by the Georgia General Assembly.

On July 31, 1962, the one-millionth immigrant was welcomed into Israel.

On July 31, 1987, “The Lost Boys” was released. From the New York Times:

“The Lost Boys” is to horror movies what “Late Night With David Letterman” is to television; it laughs at the form it embraces, adds a rock-and-roll soundtrack and, if you share its serious-satiric attitude, manages to be very funny.

Nolan Ryan, the greatest pitcher in major league baseball history, won his 300th career game on July 31, 1990. During eight innings, Ryan threw 146 pitches, while today, many pitchers are pulled at around the 100-pitch count.

“In the old days throwing that many pitches was a normal game,” said Nolan Ryan, who tossed a record seven no-hitters and is the all-time leader in strikeouts, fifth in innings pitched.

Ryan, currently the Rangers’ team president, is an outspoken detractor of the recent trend toward monitoring pitch counts. In a recent Sports Illustrated article, Ryan expressed his belief that today’s pitchers are “pampered” and that there is no reason why today’s pitchers cannot pitch as much as he and his colleagues did back in the day. As a result, Ryan is pushing his team’s pitchers to throw deeper into games and extend their arms further, emphasizing conditioning over what some would call coddling.

As Rangers pitching coach Mike Maddux told SI: “This generation of players has become a creature of the pitch count. Their ceiling has been lowered. It’s up to us to jack it back up.”

Although I think that time he whipped Robin Ventura should count as a win.

Georgia Politics, Campaigns, and Elections

Georgia was named the top state for scams, according to 13WMAZ.

Georgia has been identified as the top state for fraud, according to a recent study by Bader Scott injury lawyers.

The study, based on data from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) between April 2023 and March 2024, revealed that Georgia reported more than 177,000 fraud cases. This equates to 1,605 cases per 100,000 residents, a rate 62% higher than the national average.

Vice President Kamala Harris campaigned in Atlanta yesterday, according to the Savannah Morning News.

Some 10,000 supporters had lined up hours before to see the vice president in Atlanta, facing heat and Georgia’s infamous summer storms.

Once inside the arena, a procession of Georgia’s political heavyweights took the stage in support of Harris, including Atlanta Major Andre Dickens, former Democratic candidate for governor Stacey Abrams, and Sens. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff.

Songs spanning musical genres – from Whitney Houston to Migos – blasted through the speakers. The crowd, energized by a fresh campaign, danced with signs that simply read “KAMALA.” Megan Thee Stallion hit the stage right before Harris, performing in a bright blue pantsuit to her top hits “Mamushi” and “Body.”

“As many of you know, before I was elected vice president, and before I was elected a United States senator … I was a courtroom prosecutor,” Harris said. “So in those roles, I took on perpetrators of all kinds; predators who broke the rules for their own game.”

“As attorney general, I held the big Wall Street banks accountable for fraud,” Harris said. “Donald Trump was just found guilty of fraud. Through this campaign, I will proudly put my record against his any day.”

She dismissed the attacks that have dogged her about being Biden’s “border czar.” Harris described walking through underground tunnels with Border Patrol agents to help catch – and ultimately prosecute – drug dealers and members of cartels during her time as attorney general of a border state.

Harris also issued a challenge to Trump, demanding he face her on the debate stage. Trump previously said he will not commit to debating Harris because he’s not sure she’ll be the nominee.

The crowd broke out into cheers when Harris delivered what was likely her best received line of the night: “I do hope you’ll reconsider and meet me on the debate stage, because, as the saying goes, if you’ve got something to say, say it to my face!”

The Savannah Morning News also has a photo essay from the event.

From the Associated Press via the Valdosta Daily Times:

Little more than a week ago, Georgia appeared to be slipping out of the Democrats’ reach: President Joe Biden’s campaign pledged to concentrate more on holding the Midwestern “blue wall” states and indicated they might be willing to forsake “Sun Belt” battlegrounds. But now that Biden has bowed out of the race and Harris is the likely nominee, Democrats are expressing new hopes of an expanded electoral map.

In the state that delivered Biden his narrowest victory margin in 2020, Harris pulled off what has been a signature Trump event: A big, loud rally full of supporters cheering her name, as she mocked her rival and his running mate JD Vance as “just plain weird,” and derided their policies as backward, outdated and dangerous.

Harris seized on it. “So he won’t debate me, but he and his running mate have a lot to say about me,” she said. “And by the way, don’t you find some of their stuff to just be plain weird.”

“This is like Barack Obama 2008 on steroids for me,” said Mildred Hobson Doss, a 59-year-old who came downtown from suburban Lilburn. “I would have voted for President Biden again. But we are ready.”

In a strategy memo released after the president left the race, Harris campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon, who held the same role for Biden, reaffirmed the importance of winning Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, a trio of industrial states that have formed the traditional Democratic blue wall.

But she also argued that the vice president’s place atop the ticket “opens up additional persuadable voters” and described them as “disproportionately Black, Latino and under 30” in places like Georgia.

“The energy is infectious,” said Georgia Democratic Chairwoman Nikema Williams, a congresswoman from Atlanta. “My phone has been blowing up. People want to be part of this movement.”

Former President Donald Trump will hold a rally in Metro Atlanta this Saturday, according to the Savannah Morning News.

His campaign recently announced that Trump and his vice presidential nominee and Ohio Sen. JD Vance will hold a rally on Saturday, August 3 at the Georgia State Convocation Center, the same location that Kamala Harris hosted a rally on Tuesday.

The rally will be a ticketed event. Attendees can register for up two tickets per mobile number. Doors will open at 1 p.m. ET and Trump is slated to begin his remarks at 5 p.m.

The pair blamed Harris and her “woke policies” for Georgia’s current levels of inflation: “Under Harris and Biden, the average Georgia household is losing over $1,060 a month with inflation at 21.4%. Thanks to Harris’s war on American energy, average gas prices have reached record highs in the state.”

The announcement also referenced the murder of Laken Riley, a 22-year-old nursing student who was killed while jogging on the University of Georgia campus in Athens. The suspect in Riley’s death is Jose Antonio Ibarra, a 26-year-old migrant who entered the United States without authorization from Venezuela.

Click here to register for tickets for the Trump-Vance rally.

Vice President Harris will also campaign in Savannah, according to the Savannah Morning News.

The likely Democratic nominee will embark on a four day, seven-city tour, Politico reports, including stops in Savannah, Philadelphia, Western Wisconsin, Detroit, Raleigh, Phoenix and Las Vegas, key cities in battleground states.

The visit comes shortly after Harris’s rally Tuesday in Atlanta, and just months after a stop in Savannah while on a nationwide ‘Fight for Reproductive Freedom’ tour in February.

The date of Harris’s Savannah visit is undetermined, but will likely come at the end of next week.

Harris campaigned on Tuesday in Atlanta at the Georgia State Convocation Center. The star-studded event included a performance by Megan Thee Stallion, a short speech by rapper Quavo and appearances by Georgia Sens. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff.

From the Wall Street Journal:

Harris appears to have made early progress in reviving the coalition of Black, Latino and young voters who put Biden in the White House in 2020. A new Wall Street Journal poll conducted in late July showed those voters had greater support for her than they did for Biden in an earlier Journal survey taken after his halting debate performance on June 27.

“Black voters’ motivation to vote in this election shot up with Harris’ emergence as the presumptive nominee,” said Mike Bocian, a Democratic pollster who conducted the poll with Republican pollster David Lee.

Harris is scheduled to be back in Georgia next week as part of a battleground state tour with her future running mate.

Black voters could be the deciding factor in Georgia—a state that Biden won in 2020 by just 12,000 votes, out of five million cast. More than 33% of Georgia’s population is Black, according to U.S. census data, the highest percentage among this year’s battleground states. Biden had seen his support decline among Black men.

Harris has been a regular visitor to the state during her time as vice president, announcing economic investments and visiting historically Black colleges. Her campaign says it has 24 offices and over 170 staffers in the state.

Josh McKoon, chairman of the Georgia Republican Party, said Republicans have opened a dozen field offices around the state and that enthusiasm for Trump remains high. “Maybe [Democrats] have stopped the bleeding, but I’ve seen nothing in Georgia to indicate to me there’s a big change in the overall trajectory in this race,” he said.

The Georgia State Election Board voted to rescind actions taken earlier this month by a plurality of the Board , according to the Capitol Beat News Service via the Tifton Gazette.

Board members held a special called meeting Tuesday after a watchdog group filed a lawsuit charging the board with violating Georgia’s Open Meetings Act for meeting July 12 without the legally required public notice or a quorum. State Attorney General Chris Carr also expressed concerns that the meeting was illegal.

At the July 12 meeting, the board’s three Republicans gave preliminary approval to rules changes that would require local election officials to post daily updates on their websites and inside polling places during early voting and give poll watchers greater access on election nights while votes are being processed.

Action on the two rules had been postponed from three days earlier when the board’s regularly scheduled meeting ran long.

On Tuesday, board member Dr. Janice Johnston argued that the board recessed the July 9 meeting to July 12 in “good faith” and “in keeping with Georgia law.” Johnston, who made the motion Tuesday to rescind the July 12 actions and decide them instead on Aug. 6, said she did so in response to a “weirdly overdramatic alarm” that was raised about those votes.

She said the board’s goal is to provide elections that are “transparent, fair, free, uniform, and orderly.”

Under the schedule agreed upon Tuesday, the board will hold preliminary votes on the two proposed rules changes on Aug. 6. If approved then, a final vote would take place on Aug. 19.

Monday’s rollout by the Secretary of State’s office of a new platform to allow voters to cancel their registration may have exposed residents’ private information, according to the Associated Press via WSAV.

But Monday’s rollout of the site by Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger was marred by a glitch that allowed people to access a voter’s date of birth, driver’s license number and last four numbers of a Social Security number. That’s the same information needed to verify a person’s identity and allow a registration to be canceled.

The problem, which Raffensperger spokesperson Mike Hassinger said lasted less than an hour and has now been fixed, underscored Democratic concerns that the site could allow outsiders to unjustifiably cancel voter registrations.

“If someone knows my birthdate, you could get in and pull up my information and change my registration,” state Senate Minority Leader Gloria Butler, a Stone Mountain Democrat, said Tuesday. Democratic staff showed The Associated Press a copy of a document with Butler’s information that they said was produced by the system.

It’s another skirmish over how aggressively states should purge invalid registrations from their rolls. Democrats and Republicans have been fighting over the issue in Georgia for years, but the issue has acquired new urgency, driven by a wide-ranging national effort coordinated by Donald Trump allies to take names from rolls. Activists fueled by Trump’s lies that the 2020 election was stolen argue that existing state cleanup efforts are woefully inadequate and that inaccuracies invite fraud. Few cases of improper out-of-state voting have been proved in Georgia or nationwide.

“This is a convenient tool for any voter who wants to secure their voter registration by cancelling their old one when they move out of state,” Raffensperger said in a statement. “It will also help keep Georgia’s voter registration database up-to-date without having to rely on postcards being sent and returned by an increasingly inefficient postal system.”

He said he would encourage real estate agents to push those selling property to cancel their registrations as part of the moving process.

Voters or relatives of people who have died can enter personal information on the website. County officials would then get a notification from the state’s computer system and remove the voters. Counties will send verification letters to voters who cancel their registrations.

But for a brief time after the site was unveiled on Monday, the system preprinted the voter’s name, address, birth date, driver’s license number and last four numbers of their social security number on the affidavit. With that information, someone could then start over and cancel a registration without sending in the sworn statement.

“This portal is ripe for abuse by right-wing activists who are already submitting mass voter challenges meant to disenfranchise Georgians,” Democratic Party of Georgia Executive Director Tolulope Kevin Olasanoye said in a statement that called on Raffensperger to disable the website.

Georgia’s Secretary of State visited Macon-Bibb County elections, according to 13WMAZ.

Macon-Bibb Board of Elections Supervisor Thomas Gillon said the goal of the board is voter trust. He said they they are expecting a large turnout this fall for the presidential race, so they said the checkup is crucial for voter turnout. So, he said it’s important the county does its due diligence.

“If we say that this candidate got this many votes, that candidate got so many votes, then after our audit that we have after every election it will prove that the candidates got the number of votes that the system tells us,“ Gillon said.

The state’s election division tells us most problems with election technology are user error, but said it’s good to do check-ups on the system software. Gillon said the technology is not connected to networks, which protects it from being vulnerable to hackers.

“If anyone wants to hack it they have a tough job because they’d have to be standing in front of each piece of equipment they want to do something with,” Gillon said.

So, Raffensperger and his office did a ‘health check’ on the county’s election system. During the check, someone from the election division scanned test ballots to see if they matched the results pulled from the state’s electronic system.

The state confirmed Macon-Bibb passed the health check. Gillon said he hopes this reassures voters in the county’s election process.

Early voting starts October 15.

The Georgia state Senate Study Committee on Preservation of Georgia’s Farmlands met in Statesboro, according to the Statesboro Herald.

Georgia has lost nearly 2.9 million acres of farmland and open land to “developed landcover” in the past 50 years, reported Georgia Conservancy Inc. President Katherine Moore. What can be done to protect additional agricultural land from being gobbled up by residential, industrial and other uses? Georgia Agriculture Commissioner Tyler Harper offered suggestions.

Moore and Harper were two of the seven featured speakers Tuesday when District 4 state Sen. Billy Hickman, R-Statesboro, convened the first meeting of the Senate Study Committee on Preservation of Georgia’s Farmlands, which he chairs. It was held in Bulloch County at Georgia Southern University’s Center of Continuing Education on U.S. Highway 301 south of Statesboro.

Between 120 and 150 people attended, filling a large room in the building that until a couple of years ago was home to East Georgia State College’s Statesboro program.

The other committee members are Sen. Jason Anavitare, R-District 31, Dallas; Sen. Brandon Beach, R-District 21, Alpharetta; Sen. Jason Esteves, D-District 6, Atlanta; Sen. Russ Goodman, R-District 8, Homerville; Sen. Freddie Powell Sims, D-District 12, Dawson; and Sen. Sam Watson, R-District 11, Moultrie. They were appointed by Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, as president of the Senate, under 2024 Senate Resolution 470, of which Hickman was lead sponsor.

“The purpose of what we’re all here to discuss is to protect agriculture, but we’ve also got to provide jobs for our families, and (find) where the balance is,” Hickman told the group. “People continue to ask me, ‘What is the goal of this committee?’ And I think the goal of this committee, like so many committees, is information. You know, we don’t know what the answer is, but hopefully we can come up with some bills.”

After the meeting ended nearly three hours later, he said he expects “two or three bills to come out of this, maybe even more than that” for the 2025 legislative session.

From WTOC:

“But it really opened up our eyes that this needs to be a priority of the senate,” said State Senator, Billy Hickman.

Senator Billy Hickman and the committee members say they are giving attention to the Georgia farmers that drive the state’s economy.

One of the main topics was the negative impacts development can have on farmers.

Attendees said that around 2,000 acres of farmland is lost every day in Georgia due to population growth.

Speakers including commissioner Tyler Harper said that agriculture is what keeps this state’s economy alive.

“Agriculture is our backbone. It is what we do well, we do it, we do a lot her in our state and a lot more than a lot of other states do. We are really proud of the economy that is agriculture,” said Harper.

Bulloch County natives were very vocal about their concerns over the growing population of the region.

They asked the senate to help protect their farmland from new development.

Although many other challenges for farmers were discussed like mental health, inflation, and national security locals WTOC spoke with were thankful that the senate committee were willing to listen and make change possible.

The Senate committee told WTOC they are looking forward to going to different counties around the state to bring more awareness.

From the Capitol Beat News Service via the Albany Herald:

Single-family residential subdivisions built on large lots are gobbling up Georgia’s farmland at an alarming rate, the head of a nonprofit land preservation group said Tuesday.

The Peach State lost about 2.6 million acres of farmland and 2 million acres of forest between 1974 and 2016, Katherine Moore, president of the Georgia Conservancy, told members of a state Senate study committee. Most of that acreage has been turned into “low-intensity” residential properties, single-family homes scattered on large lots across former farmland, she said.

“Our land is a limited resource,” Moore said. “We have to think how to grow sustainably.”

“We’ve got to find ways to ensure our farmers are successful,” Georgia Commissioner of Agriculture Tyler Harper said. “We do that by making farm families successful.”

Moore said Georgia’s current population of 11 million is expected to increase to 13.5 million by 2050.

The rapid growth of “solar farms,” farmland dedicated to vast fields of solar panels, has been a factor in the loss of agricultural land, eating up 30,000 areas by 2021, Moore said. But that’s far less than the impact construction of low-density residential subdivisions has had on available agricultural acreage, she said.

Moore said local governments should focus on land-use decisions that curb the spread of low-intensity residential development.

Harper cited steps the state already has taken to incentivize farmers to stay on the land. The Georgia Farmland Conservation Act the General Assembly passed last year established a $2 million state fund to pay farmers willing to guarantee preserving their properties as farmland.

Sen. Russ Goodman, R-Cogdell, chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee and a farmer by trade, said farmers also face other challenges much broader in scope, including corporate consolidation of farms, overregulation, and unfair trade practices by foreign competitors.

Harper added inflated farm input costs and declining commodity prices to the list of challenges making it difficult for farmers to earn a profit.

“We’re asked to do more with less every day,” he said. “At some point, more with less doesn’t work anymore.”

Sen. Billy Hickman, R-Statesboro, the study committee’s chairman, said the panel will hold additional hearings this summer and fall across the state before meeting at the Georgia Capitol in November to finalize recommendations. The committee is due to issue a report by Dec. 1.

Spending by Augusta Mayor Garnett Johnson is raising eyebrows among city commissioners, according to WRDW.

On Tuesday when commission members met at the committee level, the matter was brought to the table by Mayor Garnett Johnson himself.

He was seeking reimbursement for his personal credit card, with a price tag topping $40,000.

The big reimbursement that came up deals with the mayor’s visit to the White House in May for a state dinner.

He noted that his office had a budget of $554,000 last year. He says that was the second smallest in the entire government.

The mayor also says his office returned 22% of that amount back to the general fund.

City leaders raised concerns on why the mayor was using his personal credit cards for government business.

When they asked the finance director if the policy states the mayor is required to have a city-issued card, the finance director said there is no policy to address that.

“I would never lessen my integrity by submitting a receipt based on some personal use or credit cards that I don’t own,” Johnson said. “Do you think I would jeopardize my credibility by doing that?”

The big question moving forward is: Will the mayor get a city-issued credit card?

City leaders will revisit this item at their next finance committee meeting.

Putnam County Sheriff Howard Sills said his department is getting a lot of calls about short term rentals, according to 13WMAZ.

The Sheriff’s Office has received calls about residences on Shelton Drive. Sheriff Howard Sills is in charge of policing the short term rentals when a call is placed. He says he’s gotten nine calls from people in the community complaining about renters.

“We’ve had nine complaints and we’ve only issued citations in two of those incidences where people were ticketed for those ordinances,” Sills says.

Sills said he cares about keeping his people safe and will enforce ordinances. He said he sees the benefit of having short term rental but wishes people would keep the peace.

“If you’re gonna disturb the peace, you’re gonna park in someone’s yard – then we will give you a different kind of Airbnb here at Sheriff Sills’ jail,” he said.

The Dougherty County Tax Office is having technical difficulties, according to WALB.

The technical difficulties are impacting the office’s ability to collect money for property taxes, according to a release.

As a result, the office has decided to postpone its upcoming tax sale scheduled for Aug. 6.

“We want to assure residents that we are doing everything within our power to resolve this matter promptly and to minimize any further disruptions to our services. Our team is committed to ensuring that all issues are resolved as swiftly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience this may cause,” the release said.

The Georgia Ports Authority finished their Fiscal Year with lower numbers than the previous year, according to the Savannah Morning News.

The authority finished FY2024 with container volume down 2 percent year-to-year, but a strong second half provided some reprieve to a slow start. GPA container volume was down 15.5 percent on Jan. 1, [President & CEO Griff] Lynch said, but the authority finished with six-straight months of growth.

The slight “down year” in container volume for the Georgia Ports is part of a gradual slow down after the COVID-era boom of container traffic. However, compared to pre-pandemic levels, GPA has about 3 percent of compounded annual growth which keeps it on pace with its growth projections, Lynch said at Tuesday’s GPA Board meeting.

In total, GPA handled 5.25 million twenty-foot-equivalent (TFEs) container units. While container business was slightly down, GPA had a record year in its Roll-on/Roll-off business. The group moved 876,000 autos and heavy machinery in FY2024, which is roll-on/roll-off traffic led out of the Port of Brunswick.

The authority full transitioned the entirety of its Ro/Ro capacity to Brunswick in April, Lynch said. Record gains in autos and machinery were delivered in part by cargo diverted from Baltimore’s port after a container ship struck the Francis Scott Key bridge, thus shutting down the shipping channel.

In total about 14,000 units were diverted from Baltimore to Georgia, Lynch said. The total increase in Ro/Ro volume was 152,435 units compared to FY2023, with some of that growth coming from accounts shifting to GPA from ports in Jacksonville and Charleston, Lynch said.

“What that tells us is our growth was more than just Baltimore, and that, I think, is the message,” Lynch said.

The Port of Brunswick notched another yearly record for roll-on/roll-off cargo, according to The Brunswick News.

The Port of Brunswick set a new record for roll on-roll off cargo, ending the fiscal year 2024 strong with an increase of 21% over the previous fiscal year.

Brunswick’s port handled 876,000 units of cars, trucks and heavy machinery in fiscal year 2024, an increase of 152,435 units compared to the year before, said GPA President and CEO Griff Lynch.

The news came on the heels of numbers from May, which were 26% over May 2023’s numbers. It was the single busiest month for the port in its history.

Much of the increase in business can be attributed to demand from American consumers, growing import-export trade with Europe and Asia, new car manufacturers choosing to unload at the Port of Brunswick and diverted cargo from Baltimore during April and May, Lynch said.

He also noted the addition of 120 acres of ro-ro storage at Colonel’s Island in the last fiscal year and another 300 acres available for further expansion in the future, making it the top auto port in the country for growth potential. GPA has also added 640,000 square feet of warehousing and processing space, Lynch said, increasing annual capacity at Colonel’s Island by 40% to 1.4 million units.

While the Brunswick port posted record numbers, the Port of Savannah saw a slight dip in container volume of about 2.3%. GPA handled 5.25 million of the standard twenty-foot-equivalent container units in fiscal year 2024.

“While we experienced lower container volumes, we have been through cycles before and are optimistic about the future,” Lynch said.