ATLANTA — A state Senate committee scrapped a House-approved bill seeking to task the Georgia Bureau of Investigation with investigating elections and other controversial tenets of the measure.

“This is much, much tampered down, and it’s much easier to explain,” said Republican Rep. James Burchett, the bill’s sponsor. “This is, to me, the only front facing portion in that the average electorate is going to be impacted. This just broadens the ability to vote.”

“This is much, much tampered down, and it’s much easier to explain,” said Republican Rep. James Burchett, the bill’s sponsor. “This is, to me,

The Senate committee kept only one provision from House Bill 1464 – a requirement that employers give employees at least two hours off to vote, if an employee requests it.

“We are here to consider a very limited version of the original bill and what it essentially does is allows a qualified and registered individual to vote either on one of the days designated for advanced or in-person voting or the day of the election,” said Sen. Max Burns, chair of the Senate Ethics Committee, prior to the committee vote. “It expands the ability for individuals to vote so they’re no longer constrained from taking time off from their employer.”

An original version of HB 1464 — despite being approved in the House committees and in the House chambers — was largely opposed and protested by the public.

One provision included in the original version would have tasked the GBI with elections investigations, which are currently conducted by the state elections board. GBI would be allowed to issue subpoenas for documents and materials.

Opponents had argued that it would intimidate voters and elections staff.

Another scrapped tenet would have added extra duties to election workers, requiring them to fill out “chain of custody” tracking forms when coming into contact with security paper used to print ballots, and receiving and counting absentee ballots — a task deemed burdensome on elections staff.

A proposal to require donations, grants or gifts made to local elections offices to be screened and allocated by the State Elections Board was also cut by the Senate committee. The board would have been tasked with ensuring the funds would not benefit a particular party, and develop a process to ensure “fair and equitable distribution of funds.”

“To allow a highly partisan state election board to have control over where funds would go would almost ensure the counties with the highest need will be straight out of luck. Our election staff and supervisors don’t deserve to have to cut through divisive red tape just to get the funding our state should be supplying them with in the first place,” said Desirrae Jones of the New Georgia Project Action Fund during a previous hearing.

The committee thanked Burchett for working to get his disputed bill condensed, in hopes that it would be approved before the end of the legislative session April 4. Some committee members alluded to eventually supporting other sections of the original bill.

“There are a lot of facets of the original bill that I thought highly of and I hope we get to see them again in the future,” Republican Sen. Majority Leader Mike Dugan said Tuesday during the committee meeting.