Rotten peach election curbs

It must have confounded Georgia Republicans that even though they had a GOP governor and both houses of the legislature and a fellow partisan, the now-famous Brad Raffensperger, as the elected secretary of state overseeing elections, that their party lost the 2020 presidential vote. Despite a full count and two recounts of the record number ballots of 5 million Georgians (actually the total was 40 votes shy of that mark, as turnout was 4,999,960), Joe Biden beat Donald Trump each time.

Then in January it got worse as Georgia’s two incumbent Republicans U.S. senators lost their runoff elections, flipping the chamber to Democratic rule.

Trying to make amends for this triple loss, they have now used their control of the statehouse to avoid such problems when so many people come out to vote by making voting harder, which in Georgia means preventing too many Black people from casting ballots.

Voting hours are being reduced. Absentee ballots will become more onerous. Secure drop boxes for mail ballots will be limited. Providing food or water to people waiting in line will be a crime.

But it could have been worse, handing out water bottles is a misdemeanor, not a felony and early voting on Sundays, when many Black churches encouraged voting, wasn’t banned.

Gov. Brian Kemp and his pals claim (very wrongly) that a proposed voting expansion and protection bill pushed by Democrats in Congress would be a federal takeover of states’ prerogatives. But those concerns didn’t bother them in just imposing an actual state takeover superseding local county control of elections.

And it fits right in that state Rep. Park Cannon, a Democrat who wanted to watch Kemp sign the bill into law, was arrested and handcuffed by state troopers. Did we say that Cannon is a Black woman and Kemp signed underneath a painting of a plantation. What? No paintings of a Klan rally or a lynching or a church burning were available?

There are now calls for boycotts of the Peach State. It serves them right.