SB 202 does indeed improve voting access for most Georgians, entrenching the new opportunities to vote early and absentee (by mail and drop-off) introduced during the pandemic. For example, during a generous, at least compared to blue states such as New York and the president’s own home state of Delaware, 17 days of in-person early voting, voting locations have to be open at least eight hours, with county officials given leeway to adjust the times to suit their constituents. Election Day voting hours are even longer. The window for requesting absentee ballots, which can be done online, is reduced to a “mere” 67 days, starting 11 weeks and closing 11 days before an election, to allow time for the ballot to be mailed out and returned. More restrictive proposals were floated early in the drafting process, such as eliminating no-excuse absentee voting entirely — the current policy of 16 states, including such retrogrades as Connecticut and New Hampshire — and prohibiting early voting on Sundays (criticized as targeting “souls to the polls” programs at black churches). But these sorts of measures never made it into the enacted law, even if some Democrats still claim that they did. Gabriel Sterling, a Republican election official who came to prominence for countering Trump’s election disinformation last fall, explained that some provisions “were phantoms that the leadership in both the Senate and the House told their guys, ‘Hey, introduce whatever you need to to cover yourself with your people.’” In other words, given the level of distrust and anger in the electorate, state legislators had to show that they were “tough on fraud” even if they knew certain things weren’t going to be part of the reform package.