Crossover Day halts two Georgia voting bills, advocates weigh wins and losses

Two election bills failed to pass their chambers before Crossover Day. One voting rights activists celebrated. The other was a disappointment.

“Crossover sort of tells a little bit of the story of like, there was some progress made in two different directions. There’s a very clear pro voter agenda happening here, where we defeated (Senate Bill) 568, which was a bad bill for voters, and we have promoted this other bill, the Henry McNeal Turner Voting Rights Act, to stop any more kind of dangerous things from happening to voters,” said Isabel Otero, Georgia Policy Director for the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Senate Bill 568 was a massive bill that would have drastically changed the way voters cast their ballots in Georgia. It was narrowly defeated in the Senate on Crossover Day. However, activists expect some aspects of the bill to reemerge as amendments to bills that did survive March 6. 

“It would have affected early voting sites for voters. It would have done a lot of things that, in our mind, are unnecessary and not well thought out,” Otero said.

Senate Bill 536, or the Henry McNeal Turner Voting Rights Act, also failed to pass its chamber, never receiving the opportunity for a vote.

What would the Voting Rights Act do?

The bill was named after Bishop Henry McNeal Turner, who was a former member of the state legislature, activist and leader in the African Methodist Episcopal church. He was among the 14 Black state representatives that were expelled by white lawmakers in 1868 shortly after being elected.

“His name attached to this bill sort of shows we believe in full citizenship. We believe in protecting the rights that allow us to safeguard that because these things are not guarding themselves,” Otero said. “We need to be proactive about protecting our rights, especially the voting rights because without voting rights, you can’t protect anything else.”

The Voting Rights Act would create a commission that would be in charge of determining whether any changes for elections would be discriminatory and increase the transparency on changes to election laws.

“Instead of waiting for a voter to be harmed, for their voice not to be heard,… we are saying before any of that, let’s actually make sure that this is a necessary change and that it will not impact any community inequitably,” she said.

Why do we need it?

Otero said the federal Voting Rights Act has slowly been chipped away at by the courts, and the reason voter discrimination has decreased has been because of the checks put in place to limit it.

“We need to at the state level start protecting ourselves, start making sure that we are putting forth a vision for what we want to see,” she said.

“We’re trying to reframe the conversation, which is yes, some of these federal protections exist, but they continue to go through changes because of the courts, and so rather than sort of waiting for a new set of legislation that will help, we need to do it at our state level,” she said.

What’s next? 

Before the 2026 legislative session ends, Otero said they hope to receive a hearing for the bill, and they plan to meet with communities across the state to try to build momentum for the bill to pass next session.

“We’re trying to get a hearing on it, even if it’s post-crossover. We still want people to be heard. There’s a lot of community support and encouragement behind that bill,” she said. “We are going to put forth a vision for what we want and make it happen, and so this is our vision for what it would look like to truly protect voting rights in our state.”