After failure in Georgia Senate runoff, Republicans could bring in more voting changes next year

• Georgia's GOP secretary of state told the NYT that he will propose new voting changes next year.
• Republicans lost the state's Senate runoff election, which was held under the new rules.
• Republicans, who introduced the new rules, are now questioning them, per the NYT.

Georgia Republicans are considering bringing in new voting laws after their candidate, Herschel Walker, lost the Georgia Senate runoff election on Tuesday.

Brad Raffensperger, Georgia's Republican secretary of state, told The New York Times that he would bring new voting law proposals to lawmakers next year, including making the state's big counties open more early voting locations and changing the threshold that candidates have to meet to avoid a runoff, from 50 percent to 45 percent.

Georgia Republicans already dramatically and controversially changed the state's voter laws with a slew of new voting restrictions last year, which were criticized by Democrats and voting rights campaigners at the time.

Some Republicans are now pointing fingers at those laws as they reflect on the runoff loss, The New York Times reported.

Republicans are now "cursing" the runoff system, or "at least their strategy" for trying to win that election under those new rules that they themselves introduced, the Times reported.

But there is disagreement in the party over the approach it should take with voting laws, according to the Times.

Some Republicans said after the runoff loss that the party's efforts to limit in-person early voting days potentially didn't work for them, while others want lawmakers to add more restrictions next year, the report said.

It is not clear which efforts the Times was referring to.

The current laws typically expand in-person early voting in many areas in normal elections, but NBC News reported that they reduce the number of early voting days in runoff elections because they cut the amount of time between general elections and runoff elections.

The new rules introduced by Republicans last year included cutting down the amount of time between general elections and runoff elections from nine weeks to four, as well as new restrictions on voting by mail and stricter requirements on ID when voting.

The laws were repeatedly criticized by the state's Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock, who beat Walker in the race.

Warnock's win gave Democrats an outright majority in the chamber – at least until Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema announced on Friday that she was leaving the Democratic Party to become an independent.