Republican measures target black voter turnout
GOP claims election security, Dems say voter suppression
Fuelled by black turnout, Democrats scored stunning wins in Georgia in the presidential and US Senate races. Now, Republicans are trying to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
Republican lawmakers in the once reliably red state are rolling out an aggressive slate of voting legislation that critics argue is tailored to curtail the power of black voters and undo years of work by Stacey Abrams and others to increase engagement among people of colour, including Latino and Asian American communities.
The proposals are similar to those pushed by Republicans in other battleground states: adding barriers to mail-in and early voting, major factors in helping Joe Biden win Georgia’s 16 Electoral College votes and Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff take the two Senate seats that gave Democrats control of the chamber.
But one aspect of their plans, a proposal to eliminate early voting on Sundays, seems specifically targeted at a traditional get-out-the-vote campaign used by black churches, referred to as “souls to the polls”. It’s led many to suggest Republicans are trying to stop a successful effort to boost black voter turnout in Georgia, where they make up about a third of the population and have faced a dark history of attempts to silence their voices in elections.
“It’s a new form of voter suppression, the Klan in three-piece suits rather than white hoods,” said the Reverend Timothy McDonald III of the First Iconium Baptist Church in Atlanta, which has participated in souls to the polls events. “They know the power of the black vote, and their goal is to suppress that power.”
In Georgia and elsewhere, Republicans say proposals to tighten voting access are meant to bolster confidence in elections, though they have been some of the loudest proponents of meritless claims that the election was fraudulent. The Brennan Centre for Justice, a public policy group, has counted 165 bills in 33 states this year meant to limit access to voting.
In Georgia, Republicans control state government and have introduced dozens of legislative measures that would restrict voting access. GOP state Representative Barry Fleming is chief sponsor of a wide-ranging proposal that would ban Sunday early voting, require a photo ID for absentee voting, limit the time when an absentee ballot could be requested, restrict where ballot drop boxes could be placed and curb the use of mobile voting units, among other changes.
Nse Ufot, CEO of the New Georgia Project that Abrams founded in 2014, called the GOP measures a backlash
“to our multiracial, multilingual progressive majority that is winning elections”.
Biden beat former President Donald Trump by roughly 12,000 votes, becoming the first Democrat to win a presidential contest in Georgia since 1992. Biden received nearly double the number of absentee votes as Trump in a state that became a major target of Trump’s baseless claims of fraud. Biden’s win there was confirmed in three separate counts, including one by hand.
“These measures, in our opinion, are not based on any objective, datadriven, evidence-based assessment of the issue but solely with the intention to undermine black voters and other communities of concern,” said Democratic state Representative Michael Smith, chairman of the Georgia Legislative Black Caucus Policy Committee.
Because Republicans control both chambers of the legislature and the governor’s office, at least some form of their proposals are likely to become law.