Stamping out voting rights
Georgia is still busy suppressing that pesky black vote.
Georgia’s state House passed a bill this week that includes several measures that restrict voting access, including a ban on automatic voter registration, a limit on Sunday early voting days and ballot drop boxes, and a number of restrictions and ID requirements for absentee voting. The bills come after former President Donald Trump made baseless claims of a rigged 2020 election, saying there had been widespread voter fraud in Georgia.
It also comes after the terrible Supreme Court ruling in Shelby.
In a 5-4 vote, the court struck down a formula at the heart of the Voting Rights Act, the landmark 1965 law that required certain states and localities with a history of discrimination against minority voters to get changes cleared by the federal government before they went into effect.
It’s hard to overstate the significance of this decision. The power of the Voting Rights Act was in the design that the supreme court gutted – discriminatory voting policies could be blocked before they harmed voters. The law placed the burden of proof on government officials to prove why the changes they were seeking were not discriminatory. Now, voters who are discriminated against
nowbear the burden of proving they are disenfranchised.
Back to CNN:
[Cliff] Albright [co-founder of the Atlanta-based Black Voters Matter] said the proposals directly target the methods used to mobilize Black voters. He said limiting Sunday early voting, for example, is a direct attack on “Souls to the Polls”– which is a get-out-the-vote campaign led by Black churches. A CNN analysis found that Black voters made up 34.6% of the voters who cast early ballots on the three weekend voting days that could be eliminated under the proposal from Georgia lawmakers.
The bill also prohibits free food and drinks from being served to people standing in line to vote. Volunteers often served pizza and chips to voters who stood in line for several hours at predominately Black precincts in the Atlanta area.
“Clearly, the attack is based on when it is and how it is that they know Black voters are being mobilized to turn out,” Albright said. “They know that they can’t win elections if we actually expand access to voting or even if we just maintain it.”
And the Supreme Court made it all possible.
They really give away the game with the ban on handing out food and drink. Everything else in the law could be covered with a fig leaf of an argument that it’s meant to reduce “fraud”, but there’s no way to argue that the food and drink prohibition is there for any reason other than to make people suffer for standing in line to vote. It’s pure spite. They’re not even pretending, because they know they don’t have to.
I imagine they’ll try to spin that as not wanting someone to influence their vote. Like, oh, you’re planning to vote for Trump but someone wearing a Biden button hands you a piece of pizza so you change your vote. Yeah, not likely, but that’s probably the fig leaf they’ll use.
Hmm, perhaps they’re worried that the pizza will have an embedded chip that will allow you to control how the person votes.
Anyway, I’m tempted to go down to Georgia during their next election and sell bottles of water to waiting voters for a penny.
I think it’s meant to prevent Antifa types in MAGA hats from handing out poisoned pizzas and poisoned diet cokes to likely Republican voters…