SPARTA, Ga. (AP) - A Georgia state representative has left his post as county attorney after Hancock County commissioners asked him to step down because he's sponsoring a voting bill that adds restrictions.
Commissioners voted 4-0 on Wednesday to ask Rep. Barry Fleming, a Harlem Republican, to resign.
Fleming said he stepped down after getting the request.
"Hancock County is a great place. There's a great board of commissioners there," he told WXIA-TV. "I enjoyed working with them for, I think, nine years. I only wish them the best."
Fleming leads a special House committee on voting and sponsored House Bill 531, which passed the House on a party-line vote, and is now awaiting Senate action. It would make a number of changes to Georgia's voting laws, including requiring identification for people voting by mail, limiting drop boxes and changing early voting hours to prohibit some large urban counties from offering as many weekend voting hours as they now do.
Fleming defended a 2015 effort to purge voter rolls in the Hancock County seat of Sparta. He also wrote an opinion piece in The Augusta Chronicle last November that called mail-in absentee ballots "always-suspect" and likened them to "the shady part of town down near the docks you do not want to wander into because the chance of being shanghaied is significant."
But it was Fleming's involvement in the current effort to restrict voting that prompted protests outside the Hancock County Courthouse on Wednesday before commissioners met. Fleming's district includes parts of Columbia and McDuffie counties, but does not include Hancock County, where the population is 71% African American.
""He's been part of strategic voter suppression, but this year he went all the way over the top with this House bill that he introduced," protester Johnny Thornton told Georgia Public Broadcasting. "Your attorney is supposed to be an advocate, not an adversary. You can't advocate for me and vote to suppress me at the same time."
Another protester, County Coroner Adrick Ingram, told WMAZ-TV that he wanted Fleming fired because of the bill.
"It's intentionally set forth to decrease the (election) turnout in the African American community," Ingram said.
Fleming said he had no objection to his forced departure or the politics behind it, although he said protesters "misunderstand" many of its controversial components.