Georgia House Guts Bill That Would Have Given Election Board Power To Investigate SoS

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By passing an unrelated substitute bill in its place on Tuesday, Georgia’s Republican-led House derailed a proposed bill that would have given the State Election Board (SEB) authority to investigate the secretary of state.

The Georgia Senate passed SB358 in January shortly after it passed out of the Senate Ethics Committee. The bill, as approved by the Senate, would remove the secretary of state from his role as an “ex officio nonvoting member” of the SEB and permit the board to, amongst other things, “investigate the Secretary of State” and “require the Secretary of State to cooperate with certain investigations.”

The bill clarified that the SEB has authority to investigate “the administration of primary and election laws by the Secretary of State and local election officials and frauds and irregularities in primaries and elections.”

But the House Committee on Governmental Affairs ditched the Senate’s bill in favor of a “substitute” bill that has nothing to do with the bill’s original purpose. That substitute appears to focus on campaign finance laws but includes no language authorizing the SEB to investigate the secretary of state as initially proposed.

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