ATLANTA (AP) — Georgia lawmakers are retreating from election proposals that could have allowed a Donald Trump-aligned state board to strike thousands of challenged voters from the rolls and would have required polling officials to count the number of ballots by hand.

House Bill 397 was rewritten to remove those provisions before it was passed Thursday by the Senate Ethics Committee, sending it to the full Senate for more debate.

The bill still seeks to force the state to leave the Electronic Records Information Center. Some question the funding and motives of that multistate group, which tries to maintain accurate voter rolls. But Georgia now would not be required to exit until mid-2027 instead of within months, as was earlier proposed.

Republican Rep. Tim Fleming of Covington said he and others decided to remove some of the most controversial provisions after they were panned by officials who work for Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, county election directors and others in hours of testimony Wednesday night.

“After hearing a lot of concerns, we realize there’s some things in the bill that probably needed some more work, some more time to be focused on, which we are going to work on during the off-session on our side,” Fleming said.

Supporters said poll workers need to make sure the number of ballots collected on Election Day matches the total counted by ballot-scanning machines. But county officials warned that a requirement to count by hand the number of ballots — although not individual votes — could lead to delays in reporting results, mistakes by tired workers and problems with ballot security. Some counties in Georgia conducted hand counts until a few years ago.

Similarly, supporters said the State Election Board needs to hear appeals of challenged voters because counties are turning down thousands of challenges. But opponents questioned whether the Republican-controlled board can adequately or fairly hear appeals. GOP activists challenged more than 63,000 voters statewide last summer, but most were rejected by counties.

The State Election Board adopted a series of rules amid intense scrutiny last year only to see a judge throw most of them out, finding that the board overreached its legal authority. An appeal of that ruling was argued last week before the Georgia Supreme Court.

The bill still seeks to put some rejected rules into law. That includes allowing increased access in election offices for partisan-appointed poll watchers and requiring counties to publish more statistics about absentee ballots.

The measure also includes other Republican goals, like a ban on counties opening election offices the weekend before an election to let voters hand-deliver ballots. State and federal judges slapped down Republican lawsuits to block the practice last November.

Other items cater to Republicans’ continuing distrust of the election system, like requiring live nighttime video surveillance of ballot drop boxes that are emptied and then padlocked shut inside government buildings closed to the public.

Jeff Amy, The Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump revealed his intentions to reshape the Smithsonian Institution with an executive order Thursday that targets funding to programs with “divisive narratives” and “improper ideology.”

Trump said there has been a “concerted and widespread” effort over the past decade to rewrite American history by replacing “objective facts” with a “distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.”

He signed an executive order putting Vice President JD Vance in charge of an effort to “remove improper ideology” from the Smithsonian Institution, including its museums, education and research centers and the National Zoo.

Darlene Superville, The Associated Press

ATLANTA (AP) — A Georgia bill to codify the right to in vitro fertilization got overwhelming approval from the state Senate Thursday, setting it up to move to Gov. Brian Kemp’s desk for his signature.

The House approved it last month, and the chamber will likely approve the final version Friday.

Republican Rep. Lehman Franklin drew bipartisan support for his bill, which he introduced in part over concerns about access to the treatment after the Alabama Supreme Court ruled last year that frozen embryos can be considered children under state law. After multiple rounds of IVF and a plan to adopt fell through, Franklin and his wife Lorie were finally able to conceive using the treatment. They’re expecting a baby girl this summer.

“We wanted to find the language to safeguard it so we didn’t have any kind of experience that other states might have had in the past,” Franklin said in an interview. “We want to get ahead of the game and make sure that we’re safe.”

Lorie Franklin joined her husband in the House and Senate when each chamber voted on the bill.

Some conservatives are skeptical of IVF because some embryos are discarded in the process. Franklin said floating concerns are “satellite issues that are worthy of debate,” that could be addressed separately.

Legal experts say Georgia’s current law does not pose a significant threat to IVF the way Alabama’s constitution did.

A handful of states have “personhood” laws, which give rights to fertilized eggs, embryos or fetuses. Georgia’s personhood law defines a fetus as a person and is one of the broadest, giving rights such as tax breaks and child support to unborn children.

But the Alabama ruling relied on the wording of the state’s wrongful death statute and language added to the Alabama Constitution in 2018 protecting the “rights of the unborn children.” After the ruling, Alabama’s governor signed legislation protecting IVF providers from legal liability.

Still, the bill’s passage comes a day after a hearing on House Bill 441 that would make most abortions a homicide and recognize fetuses as people from the point of fertilization. House Republican sponsors of that bill voted in favor of Franklin’s bill protecting IVF access. But doctors told the committee the bill would bar access to IVF.

“Ultimately, I don’t think they’re going to be able to go all the way with personhood and simultaneously protect IVF the way they want to,” said Duke University law professor Jolynn Dellinger in an interview last month, referring to those who want to push the laws defining personhood further.

For now, though, IVF access will remain protected in Georgia. President Donald Trump has also affirmed his support for IVF access, including through an executive order aiming to reduce its cost.

Republican House Speaker Jon Burns made the bill to protect IVF a priority this session.

___

Kramon is a corps member for The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues. Follow Kramon on X: @charlottekramon.

Charlotte Kramon, The Associated Press

ATLANTA (AP) — Georgia’s Republican-dominated state Senate is going forward with an investigation of Stacey Abrams, a move that comes as President Donald Trump has made a target of the two-time Democratic nominee for Georgia governor.

Republican State Sen. Bill Cowsert of Athens said Thursday that he and other Republicans want to further examine recent ethics findings that voter participation group New Georgia Project improperly coordinated with Abrams’ 2018 campaign for governor.

“We have developed somewhat of a problem these days with dark money in politics, with secret money being used to fund campaigns,” Cowsert said. “The whole purpose of our campaign finance laws is to put sunshine on the issues.”

They also want to probe claims by new U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin that $2 billion was improperly given to a coalition of groups trying to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. Abrams worked with one of the groups until the end of last year, but Trump and other Republicans have made Abrams the face of their criticism of $20 billion in grants awarded by former President Joe Biden’s administration, with Trump calling out Abrams in a recent joint address to Congress.

Senators voted 33-21 along party lines to approve the inquiry.

The same Georgia committee has been pursuing a thus-far fruitless investigation of another Trump enemy, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis.

“We have already spent precious time investigating people for headlines and clicks, while providing taxpayers with little benefit,” said state Sen. Jason Esteves, an Atlanta Democrat.

Abrams has said that Republicans are targeting her because she’s been politically effective.

The former state House minority leader, Abrams vaulted to national Democratic stardom when she came close to defeating Republican Gov. Brian Kemp in 2018. She parlayed voting rights after that election into a national platform and even consideration as Biden’s running mate in 2020, but lost a 2022 governor’s race rematch to Kemp by a broader margin.

The resolution means the GOP-led Senate can conduct meetings scrutinizing a second high-profile Democrat as Lt. Gov. Burt Jones and several members of the investigatory committee consider running for office in 2026.

Armed with subpoena power, the committee has been trying to force Willis to testify about whether she did anything wrong in her investigation and prosecution of Trump and others. However, its efforts thus far have disclosed little that wasn’t already known about Willis and her hiring of special prosecutor Nathan Wade, with whom she had a romantic relationship, to lead the prosecution against Trump and others.

Abrams founded the New Georgia Project in 2013 to register more nonwhite and young voters in Georgia and to urge them to turn out. She stepped down in 2017 and said she had no role with the group thereafter.

In January, the New Georgia Project and its affiliated New Georgia Project Action Fund admitted that they broke Georgia’s campaign finance law by failing to register as an independent campaign committee and failing to disclose contributions and spending. The Ethics Commission fined the groups $300,000, the largest ethics fine in state history, mostly for violations that supported Abrams’ 2018 run for governor.

The group has been in turmoil, laying off workers, some of whom said they were fired because they were trying to form a union.

On Feb. 12, the Trump-appointed Zeldin called for the return of $2 billion granted to Power Forward Communities in April 2024, part of $20 billion that Zeldin claimed was improperly granted by Biden’s administration.

Abrams was senior counsel to Rewiring America until December. That’s one of the groups that made up the Power Forward Communities coalition. Abrams wasn’t paid by Power Forward Communities, spokesperson Joshua Karp has said.

One of the other nonprofits that got $7 billion of the $20 billion has sued the EPA, accusing it of improperly freezing a legally awarded grant.

Climate United Fund, a coalition of three nonprofit groups, demanded access to a Citibank account it received through the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, a program created in 2022 by the Inflation Reduction Act and more commonly known as the green bank.

In a related action, the Coalition for Green Capital, a separate group that received $5 billion from the Biden-era program, sued Citibank, alleging breach of contract over the refusal to disburse the grant funds.

Jeff Amy, The Associated Press