Georgia Today: Ossoff pushes for USPS legislation; Election board changes; Braves fan fave to retire

Peter Biello: Welcome to the Georgia Today podcast from GPB News. Today is Thursday, Sept. 19. I'm Peter Biello. On today's episode, Sen. Jon Ossoff pushes legislation that he says will help fix the Postal Service. The State Election Board is set to vote on more rule changes ahead of the November election. And a Braves fan favorite is hanging up his cleats for good. These stories and more are coming up on this edition of Georgia Today.

Story 1:

Peter Biello: Georgia U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff is pushing legislation that he says will address what he calls, quote, "leadership failures" at the U.S. Postal Service. GPB's Chase McGee has more.

Chase McGee: In Georgia, a transition to the Palmetto Regional Processing and Distribution Center led to massive delays at the USPS. Ossoff's bill, called the Postmaster General Reform Act, proposes term limits and requires Senate confirmation for the chief officer of the Postal Service. Ossoff emphasized the importance of the Postal Service for Georgians who rely on the mail for health care and for legal documents.

Jon Ossoff: High-quality postal service can't be a luxury. It is a necessity. And we see the importance now of holding the postmaster general accountable to the elected representatives of the people in the U.S. Senate.

Chase McGee: Current Postmaster General Louis DeJoy was appointed by then President Donald Trump and is still serving a seven-year term. Ossoff says that if passed, his legislation would take effect the next time a president nominates their pick for the job. For GPB News, I'm Chase McGee.

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Election

Story 2:

Peter Biello: The State Election Board is set to vote tomorrow on more election rule changes — this as members of both parties say any rule changes can be disruptive and confusing this close to the November election. The Republican-controlled board says the new rules are about election integrity. The board has proposed nearly a dozen rules to consider tomorrow. Democrats say they're an attempt to sow chaos in the event of another Trump loss. The state board has no direct role in determining election results, but instead writes rules to ensure that elections are run smoothly. The board also hears complaints about violations. With mail ballots already going out to military and overseas voters, county election officials say it's too late for new rules. The Georgia Association of Voter Registration and Election Officials has been repeatedly critical of many of the proposed changes, saying they provide little benefit, duplicate efforts of already required procedures or invite local boards to refuse to certify results. Some Republicans argue that county election boards can decline to certify election results. A Republican-appointed Fulton County board member is asking a judge to affirm that position in a lawsuit. But court decisions in Georgia and nationwide say officials cannot refuse.

Story 3:

Peter Biello: Officials in Macon-Bibb County have announced a new affordable housing development in the heart of one of the city's most prominent historically b\Black neighborhoods. GPB's Grant Blankenship has more.

Grant Blankenship: Over the years, Macon's Pleasant Hill neighborhood has suffered wounds like bank disinvestment driven by federal redlining and being cut in half by the construction of Interstate 75. Now, 64 apartments across three multistory blocks are planned for Pleasant Hill Landing. Financed through about $1.4 million in federal low income housing tax credits. Ashley Woodford grew up in Pleasant Hill.

Ashley Woodford: When I was young, I used to rock through the neighborhoods singing gospel songs to the people who would just sit on their porch.

Grant Blankenship: She says her neighbors need the new housing.

Ashley Woodford: People can't pay $1,000, $900 in rent. We need some that's actually affordable in our neighborhood that looks nice so people can be proud of it.

Grant Blankenship: Rent at Pleasant Hill Landing will be capped at $600 a month when it's completed in about two years. For GPB News, I'm Grant Blankenship in Macon.

Story 4:

Peter Biello: Georgia Pacific plans to transform its 51-story headquarters building in downtown Atlanta into a mixed-use development with residential office, retail and other spaces. If the project is realized, the paper and packaging giant says it would be one of the country's largest office-to-mixed-use conversions and create the South's highest apartments. The plans come as office demand remains weak post-COVID and downtown Atlanta repositions itself to attract more residents and visitors.

Story 5:

Peter Biello: Three-quarters of Georgia is considered rural. So are the communities of about a fifth of the people living in the U.S.. Yet public health in these areas has been largely understudied and underfunded. But as GPB's Sofi Gratas reports, the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now hopes to strengthen its rural efforts.

Sofi Gratas: The CDC's Office of Rural Health released its strategic plan last week. Its mission includes putting more focus on research that benefits rural residents and bolstering health care infrastructure. Compared to urban residents, people who live in rural places are often at greater risk for common preventable diseases and early death, the CDC reports. But office director Diane Hall says with a dedicated office, they can better explore regional differences.

Diane Hall: Everybody's always interested in how is rural comparing to nonrural areas, and I think that's an important comparison. But I don't think that the results are often surprising and I don't think that that finding is very actionable.

Sofi Gratas: Hall says the new plan is the first step towards eventual work on the ground. For GPB News, I'm Sofi Gratas.

Story 6:

Peter Biello: In Georgia, citizens are free to challenge the validity of voters' registrations. But putting together a list of challenges takes time and some investigative expertise. Now, an artificial intelligence tool is being developed to compile voter challenges quickly and at scale. Let's go back to Grant Blankenship as he reports that there is reason to doubt their accuracy.

Grant Blankenship: It's the first day of early voting in the May primary, and the conference room at the back of the Bibb County Board of Elections is packed, spilling into the hall to hear David Sumrall.

David Sumrall: My purpose is simply to help move us — move us toward the cleanest voter roll possible.

Grant Blankenship: Sumrall heads the local Republican Party. He has a stack of just under 800 county voter registrations — close to 1% of Bibb County voters — to challenge.

David Sumrall: My challenge today applies to three different set of voters.

Grant Blankenship: He has 48 voters whose registered addresses are P.O. boxes, 159 Mercer University students sharing the same on-campus address, and 585 people he claims are double registered in two communities, all on a spreadsheet, which does not impress election board member Karen Evans Daniel.

Karen Evans Daniels: Because anybody can make a spreadsheet.

Grant Blankenship: And where, she asked Sumrall, did it come from anyway?

David Sumrall: This information was compiled from state and federal sourced data using the Eagle AI network.

Grant Blankenship: And Eagle AI or Eagle Eye, a software developed by Columbia County doctor John W. "Rick" Richards Jr. Its implied promise: If anybody can make a spreadsheet, Eagle AI can make a spreadsheet faster than anybody.

Rick Richards: We use Jason's algorithms to — to help develop some of these workspaces.

Grant Blankenship: That's Richards on a Zoom call about Eagle AI obtained by the nonprofit Investigative newsroom Documented.

Rick Richards: So, Jason, how's it going in Fulton County with your, let me say, 30,000 challenges?

Grant Blankenship: "Jason" is Jason Frazier, a pioneer in Georgia voter challenge circles. His playbook is echoed by the challenges in Bibb County: Question voter addresses at post office boxes and other nonresidential addresses; and be suspect of voter names showing up in more than one city or state. If you've ever Googled yourself and found someone with your name on the other side of the country, you see how widespread that last problem could be. But what Rick Richards has done is create software that very quickly, with a few keystrokes, cross-references threads like the local voter rolls, and the National Change of Address database, to generate challenge lists along Frazier's lines at high speed and high volume. On a more recent Zoom call, also obtained by Documented, Richards says Eagle Eye is intended for three types of people.

Rick Richards: One is the — the citizen who wants to verify their state voter rolls, county voter rolls; the county who is getting 15,000 challengers on a spreadsheet and doesn't know what to do with them; and then we can also do it at the state level.

Grant Blankenship: But the state of Georgia so far doesn't want Richards' help, says Mike Hassenger, spokesperson for the Georgia secretary of state's office.

Mike Hassenger: We have much, much better tools in the form of the Electronic Registration Information Center, ERIC.

Grant Blankenship: ERIC was the generally accepted tool for checking voter registrations until a few years ago, when far-right activists began discrediting it. But through ERIC, officials can see what is otherwise private information.

Mike Hassenger: We have access through ERIC, for instance, to the master death database from Social Security.

Grant Blankenship: Eagle AI just scrapes newspaper obituaries. But Eagle AI is blind to many official government sources, is a fact about which Rick Richards expressed some jealousy on Zoom.

Rick Richards: I want access to the data that ERIC gets automatically. It would make our product and other people who are working it, so much more effective if we just get the date of birth, for example. If we just get the real felon list.

Grant Blankenship: Regardless, voter challenges have to be heard. And remember who Richards says is the second target group for the software?

Rick Richards: The county who is getting 15,000 challengers on a spreadsheet and doesn't know what to do with them.

Grant Blankenship: Now imagine county boards of election using Eagle AI to vet voter challenges created by Eagle AI. Marissa Pyle of the advocacy group All Voting Is Local says that's a problem.

Marissa Pyle: It's — it's an ouroboros of disinformation at this point.

Grant Blankenship: A disinformed snake eating its own tail, which Pyle says could stoke election deniers.

Marissa Pyle: If we keep finding these programs that return faulty results that support this narrative of mass ineligibility. It then — it keeps those folks engaged. It keeps them angry about this perceived problem. And it — it fuels that fire.

Grant Blankenship: Georgia Secretary of State spokesperson Michael Hassenger says about a year ago, Richards tried to sell Eagle AI to the state, essentially claiming the software is the fire extinguisher.

Mike Hassenger: If I were trying to sell a product where you have a significant percentage of the population of voters who don't trust the election process and wanted to scare them into purchasing my product, I'd make claims like that.

Grant Blankenship: The state has not yet bought. But in Richards' native Columbia County, it's a different story. There, the County Board of Elections signed a contract with Eagle AI. But County Election Supervisor Nancy Gay says she can't yet vouch for it.

Nancy Gay: That's correct, because he has — hasn't signed their agreement and returned it back to us yet.

Grant Blankenship: Richards hasn't signed his side of the contract, and Gay says if he ever does, she doesn't intend to use Eagle AI alone to check registrations.

Nancy Gay: Nooo. No, it's just — it would be a tool. Yeah, just another tool that we could have in our, you know, or at our disposal, I guess, to — to try and help keep a clean voter list.

Grant Blankenship: A just-passed Georgia law, SB 189, seems tailor made to set up Eagle AI as the tool for checking registrations. For instance, SB 189 allows problems surfaced through the National Change of Address Database to be sufficient for removing a voter, giving extra validity to the "one name in two places" argument. It also eliminates using post office boxes as proof of residency for voting purposes. SB 189 went into effect in July. Back at the Bibb County Board of Elections, board members did their own research of David Sumrall's Eagle AI-generated challenge of 585 voter registrations.

Karen Evans Daniels: Of that list, 551 of those voters are inactive, according to the secretary of state's office, because the secretary of state has access that we as regular humans do not have access to.

Grant Blankenship: As for the other challenges? Every building on the Mercer University campus shares the same single address. So the students registered there? Board says they're in the clear. The board denies David Sumrall's challenges. Afterwards, he says it's not like he didn't see the board's decision coming.

David Sumrall: Well, actually, they're able better to check the work than I am because they have access to more than I do.

Grant Blankenship: But he says he might file more challenges. And will he put his name on an Eagle AI list again?

David Sumrall: We'll see. we'll see. Maybe.

Grant Blankenship: And even if those fail, they could get people thinking and talking — and doubting. John W. "Rick" Richards Jr. declined to be interviewed for this story. For GPB News, I'm Grant Blankenship in Macon.

Caption

Charlie Culberson

Story 7:

Peter Biello: In sports, former Braves fan favorite Charlie Culberson officially announced his retirement this afternoon via Instagram. Culberson is a graduate of Calhoun High School in Northwest Georgia. He was originally drafted by the San Francisco Giants, but played with the Dodgers, Braves and the Rangers, all as mostly a utility player and was widely considered a tremendous clubhouse guy. Culberson did take a brief run at being a full-time pitcher in his last minor league stint with the Braves earlier this year. As for the Braves, last night Marcell Ozuna homered, Gio Urshela drove in three runs and Spencer Schwellenbach pitched six innings of one-run ball as the Atlanta Braves beat the Cincinnati Reds 7 to 1 last night. The win allowed the Braves to stay within two games of the Mets for the final National League wild card spot, and that position may improve. As of the recording of this podcast on Thursday afternoon, the Braves are leading the Reds 11 to 2 in the seventh inning.

And that's all we've got for this edition of Georgia Today. We do appreciate you tuning in and we appreciate your support as well. We've got our fall fund drive going on right now. And the best way to support this podcast and all the programs you hear on GPB is to make a contribution in any amount. Really. You get to choose. 10 bucks a month is a good way to start as a GPB Sustainer. We hope you'll do it now at GPB.org. You can also call (800) 222-4788. And thank you so much. If you want the latest updates on the news, you can always check our website, GPB.org/news. And if you subscribe to this podcast, well, we will pop up automatically in your podcast feed tomorrow. We are all ears when it comes to feedback. Please do send it to us by email. Our address is GeorgiaToday@GPB.org. That's GeorgiaToday@GPB.org. And it goes to the whole team. I'm Peter Biello. Thank you so much for listening. We'll see you tomorrow.

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