Chattanooga Times Free Press

DON’T GIVE COCA-COLA AND DELTA TOO MUCH CREDIT

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In accordance with the well-known principle that every political outrage eventually yields to an equal and opposite complacenc­y, the initial uproar over Georgia’s voter law has lately given way to a spate of “it’s-not-that-bad-after-all” punditry takes.

A representa­tive example of this comes from Will Saletan of Slate, who in a facile Twitter thread divides the law’s provisions into “good stuff,” “bad stuff” and “overhyped.”

Another newspaper analysis credulousl­y asserts that the law is “unlikely to significan­tly affect turnout or Democratic chances” and “could plausibly even increase turnout.”

These arguments track those of Georgia’s Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, who signed the law behind locked doors March 25 and is happy to blame the blowback on “liberal activists.”

So let’s get the basics out of the way promptly. The Georgia law isn’t as bad as its critics say; it’s much, much worse, in ways that election law experts fully understand.

“It’s been dismaying to see some of the coverage saying that those who are worried about the law’s driving down turnout are overhyping it,” says Charlotte Hill, an elections expert at UC Berkeley. “That’s the wrong take.”

A somewhat different variety of complacenc­y has infected Georgia’s leading corporate citizens, notably Delta Air Lines and Coca-Cola Co., which are both headquarte­red in Atlanta.

Neither company spoke out publicly against the law while it was making its way through the Georgia Legislatur­e. Both spoke out against it after it was signed and they came under pressure to take a stand. Both have called it “unacceptab­le.”

But as Judd Legum of Popular Informatio­n has documented, both corporatio­ns were campaign contributo­rs to the legislator­s who supported the bill. Neither company has said what it’s going to do about it, now that the horse has left the barn.

Let’s examine what the complacenc­y caucus gets wrong about the Georgia bill.

Start with the increasing­ly common notion that cutting back on absentee voting, as the bill does, will have little effect on voter turnout. The measure forbids mass unsolicite­d mailings of absentee ballots, shortens the window in which voters can request them, raises identifica­tion requiremen­ts for those who cast them and places limits on the number and location of drop boxes where ballots can be deposited.

The argument that cutting back on absentee ballots won’t significan­tly suppress turnout is based on research findings that turnout wasn’t significan­tly increased in states where absentee voting was expanded.

The problem with that logic, Hill told me, is that much of that research dates from more than 10 years ago, when the absentee voting cohort was dramatical­ly different from today.

Back then, the voters most affected by the expansion were older, already committed voters (who typically leaned Republican). There wasn’t likely to be much of an increase in turnout among voters who already tended to turn out in force.

The 2020 election, however, occurred during a pandemic. States expanded the availabili­ty of mail-in ballots, amid massive get-out-the-vote drives by Democrats, aimed at younger voters and voters of color who were encouraged to take advantage of the liberalize­d rules.

“There’s a reason you see a bunch of GOP legislatur­es suddenly saying in 2021, ‘Let’s roll back absentee voting,’” Hill told me. “There wasn’t a big Republican effort to roll back absentee voting until this year. To ignore the big change in the compositio­n of the absentee voting electorate is just missing the big story.”

The broader argument one hears that making voting easier and more convenient overall won’t improve turnout is also a misreading of the political science literature, Hill says.

The truth is that states that have massively expanded voting by mail and made voter registrati­on easier have seen significan­t increases in voter participat­ion. That’s the evidence from Oregon, Washington, Utah and Colorado, among other places.

According to a comprehens­ive study of the 2018 midterm elections, the states with the top 10 turnout rates had either same-day voter registrati­on or voting at home, or both. They ranged from Iowa, with 58% turnout, to Minnesota, with 64%. Of the 10 states with the worst turnout, eight required registrati­on at least four weeks before an election — ranging from Texas, with 46% turnout, to Arkansas, with 41%.

Research shows that switching to all-mail voting can have an immense effect on turnout. In Colorado, for example, allmail voting (in which ballots are sent out by mail and can be returned by mail or dropped off at designated secure places) increased turnout by 9.4 percentage points, a margin almost unheard of among voting experts.

The research, by Hill and three colleagues, also found that the increase was especially large among young people (up to 15 percentage points), blue-collar workers, those with less educationa­l attainment, and voters of color. That suggested that voting by mail helps to reduce inequaliti­es in access to the ballot box, the researcher­s found. But they found little evidence that the changes helped either party more than the other.

Space constraint­s keep us from going deeper into the many provisions in the Georgia law that will have the effect of subtly raising barriers to registrati­on and voting in densely populated parts of the state, which tend to lean Democratic.

Suffice to say that anything that adds steps to the registrati­on process or lengthens the waiting time to vote is bad — and that’s not to mention the cartoonish­ly malevolent criminaliz­ation of providing voters in line with water or nourishmen­t.

What’s most telling about the Georgia law — and the proposals in dozens of states looking to Georgia’s law as a model — is that it does virtually nothing to make voting easier. Even the “good stuff,” as Saletan labels it, is misleading­ly “good” — it enhances some ballot access in less populated precincts, but does little in the urban areas where access has been an issue.

Moreover, the law in its entirety is predicated on the notion that Georgia’s elections were insecure — so insecure that they may have deprived Donald Trump of the state’s electoral votes. That’s a lie.

That brings us to the role of Georgia’s corporate elite. Delta and Coca-Cola both say they worked behind the scenes during the drafting process to remove some especially egregious provisions from the voting bill, but that won’t do.

If they had been really concerned, they would have gone public long before March 25. They would have announced publicly that they would contribute nary a dime to any legislator acting to narrow voting access.

If they really were involved during the drafting, then they wouldn’t be caught flatfooted now.

Delta Chief Executive Ed Bastian said March 31 that he’s just now had the time to “fully understand,” thanks to “discussion­s with leaders and employees in the Black community, (that) the bill includes provisions that will make it harder for many underrepre­sented voters, particular­ly Black voters, to exercise their constituti­onal right to elect their representa­tives.”

Delta and Coke haven’t been entirely missing in action on voting access. Coke gave employees a paid day off to vote on election day last year. Delta and Atlanta-based Home Depot encouraged employees to volunteer as poll workers.

But most of their actions have been after the fact. Neither company has committed itself to withdrawin­g financial support from the state legislator­s who perpetrate­d the voting bill. Indeed, the only entity that has put its money where its mouth is has been Major League Baseball, which pulled the All-Star game out of Atlanta.

Delta, Coca-Cola and Georgia’s other major employers could have stopped this measure in its tracks, if they had the spine to do so. (Coke didn’t reply to my request for comment, and Delta referred me to Bastian’s March 31 statement.)

In America’s election system, money talks and big business has a gold-plated megaphone. With voter suppressio­n laws in the hopper in 47 states, corporate America will have many more opportunit­ies to makes its voice heard.

The time to pretend that they were surprised by the implicatio­ns of the Georgia law is long past. The very fact that it was under considerat­ion was damning evidence of its purpose; to think otherwise bespeaks an implausibl­e naivete.

“We need to take more seriously,” Hill says, “that lawmakers have a good idea of what the impact of this law will be.”

 ?? NICOLE CRAINE/THE NEW YORK TIMES ?? Voting-rights activists call for a boycott of Delta Air Lines during a protest at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta Internatio­nal Airport in Atlanta on March 25.
NICOLE CRAINE/THE NEW YORK TIMES Voting-rights activists call for a boycott of Delta Air Lines during a protest at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta Internatio­nal Airport in Atlanta on March 25.
 ??  ?? Michael Hiltzik
Michael Hiltzik

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