Voting rights: Is Georgia’s new law Jim Crow 2.0?
This was the week the Republican “effort to suppress the vote at all costs” became reality, said Ruth Marcus in The Washington Post. Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, flanked by six white fellow Republicans and standing under a painting of a former slave plantation, signed Georgia’s SB-202, a 96-page package of laws designed to make it harder for Georgians— African-Americans in particular—to vote. Among other “shameful” measures, the bill restricts the use of mail-in ballots and ballot drop boxes, which Black Georgians used disproportionately in 2020, while requiring absentee voters to provide copies of state-issued ID that 200,000 voters, disproportionately Black, don’t possess. After the “terrible elections cycle” in 2020, explained Republican election official Alice O’Lenick, laws needed to be changed so “we at least have a shot at winning.” The law even criminalizes giving food or water to voters waiting in line, said Zack Beauchamp in Vox.com. Why? Hint: The hours-long voting lines in Georgia’s majority-Black urban centers are among the worst in the country. The new law even authorizes the state legislature—controlled by Republicans—to overrule county boards of election, “disqualifying voters and ballots as they see fit.” President Biden was not exaggerating this week when he slammed the law as “Jim Crow in the 21st century.”
To borrow Biden’s favorite phrase, “‘C’mon, man,’” said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. SB-202 actually preserves absentee balloting, but with an earlier application deadline and a voter-ID number replacing unreliable signature matching to verify each ballot. Drop boxes instituted because of the pandemic will be more tightly regulated, but will continue. How is it “‘Jim Crow 2.0’ to give absentee voters more options than they had in 2019?” As for the infamous “water ban,” said Dan McLaughlin in NationalReview.com, the law allows elections officials to provide food and water to waiting voters. What’s now banned are activists in union T-shirts or MAGA hats handing out Poland Spring or pizza as a form of subtle or overt electioneering.
The bill would “have been much worse” had an outcry not forced Republicans to water it down, said Ed Kilgore in NYMag .com. The proposed ban on Sunday “souls to the polls” voting, for example, was dropped. But we have a “rich record of public comments” affirming the law’s nefarious partisan intentions. Gov. Kemp justified the new law by citing “alarming issues with how the [2020] election was handled,” even though hand recounts, audits, and Republican elections officials found no evidence of fraud. The only “alarming issue” was that Democrats won, said Steve Benen in MSNBC.com, and the law’s “most ominous” provision has a cure for that. Partisan state legislators now have the power to intervene to reject ballots and make other critical elections decisions, making it possible for Georgia Republicans to legally do what Donald Trump demanded—simply “refuse to certify” a legitimately elected Democratic ticket.
Republicans don’t care if this all looks racist, said Paul Waldman in The Washington Post. In fact, they “want Democrats to accuse them of racism.” Why? Because it fires up their own voters, who are told hourly by Fox News and talk radio that accusations of racism are a weapon in the liberal plot to silence conservatives and subjugate white people. This paranoid narrative not only drives Republican voters to the polls—it distracts them “from asking what the GOP has actually done for them lately.”