The whole ballgame
Unless the courts say otherwise, the Georgia legislature has a right to make it harder for citizens there to vote by imposing curbs on absentee ballots, limiting access to secure drop-boxes and prohibiting mobile voting buses like those used in the state’s most populous county. Add them up and, surprise surprise, the Republicans who make the laws in Atlanta have found a way to stack the deck against the state’s Democrats, many of whom happen to be Black.
But individuals and corporations have the same right to stand up to what Joe Biden has hyperbolically, unhelpfully called a return to Jim Crow. (No, the law does not “end voting hours early” as the president claimed; in fact, it expands access to early voting.)
Kudos, then, to Black business leaders and other corporate bigwigs who are using their clout to press the state to rethink what can only be read as retaliation for the fact that Georgians chose Biden in November and went on to elect two Democratic senators. If Republicans listened to Secretary of State Brad
Raffensperger rather than buying hook, line and sinker unfounded claims about widespread fraud spread by Donald Trump, they never would’ve imposed this anti-democratic solution to a nonexistent problem.
Ensuring equal access to the ballot isn’t just the job of prominent people of color; it ought to be an all-in American project. Which is why, as an act of principled protest, Major League Baseball would be wise to move this year’s All-Star Game from the Peach State to someplace that hasn’t just thrown up major roadblocks to the right to the franchise.
Some might lament this do-it-or-else world, in which companies are subjected to pass-or-fail political exams based on what might seem like partisan litmus tests.
But equal access to the ballot box ought to be sacrosanct. Georgia-born Jackie Robinson once said, “I always decide my vote by taking as careful a look as I can at the actual candidates and issues themselves, no matter what the party label.” Let every Georgian do the same.