As a Georgia voter who voted absentee during COVID:
1. We already have an ID requirement. To get an ID where I live it’s about a 45 minute drive and there’s no public transportation. When we moved here, it took a few trips to bring all of the proper documents, even after checking the website for what we needed. It’s not exactly conducive to a poor person getting an ID, but that ship has long since sailed. It’s not new. Mobile units or drives would be nice though.
2. I had to submit an ID number to get my absentee ballot. During the primaries the system was still pretty bad, but by the general, things were updated, easy, and convenient. The SOS did a really good job with absentee voting and the COVID response.
3. For the reasons already mentioned, signature matching stresses me out. Judgement is very subjective and many signatures are so variable. A number seems better on this respect. At one point there was talk of requiring a photocopy of the ID, so the number seems better than that.
4. A number is also easy to mess up when filling out a form. I suspect that a certain percentage of ballots will be thrown out due to simple human error in writing down the right number. There might be demographic trends to this, I don’t know. I’ve never gone through the ballot curing process personally, but I did scan the lists in November to see if I knew anyone on it.
Generally, those changes seem positive to me. I believe they also allowed or required earlier counting of absentee ballots to avoid some of the issues of this year. That’s also a good change.
The water thing seems cartoonishly bad. The election board stuff seems more troubling.