It’s Not Just This Bill. Georgia Has a Long History of Voter Suppression. Here Are Some Facts.
After Georgia flipped to the blue column for both the presidential election and both of the senate run-offs, voting rights advocates were dismayed, but unsurprised, that the Georgia legislature responded with yet another wide-ranging attack upon the right to vote. A bill just signed into law Thursday night by Governor Kemp limits the number of county drop boxes, requires photo ID for mail-in ballots, shortens the time to apply for absentee voting, expands the legislature’s power over elections, and makes illegal the providing of food or water by third parties to those waiting in line near a polling station, according to reporting by the New York Times.
Many around the country were shocked at the brazenness of the GOP-controlled legislature in Georgia, as well as in other states such as Iowa that have enacted more voting restrictions. Over 250 measures have been proposed across 43 states that would have the effect of limiting or suppressing votes, especially among ethnic minorities. But in Georgia, this was more or less standard procedure for the GOP. The state has been ground zero in the fight for voting rights for many years now.
The U.S Commission of Civil Rights reported in 2018 that Georgia was the only state formerly under federal oversight under the Voting Rights Act of 1964 to adopt all five of the most common tactics to suppress the vote: Voter ID Laws, proof of citizenship requirements, voter roll purges, cuts in early voting, and polling place closures. Between the 1960s and 2012, the Justice Department objected to a whopping 177 election rule changes across Georgia. Then in 2013, Justice Roberts gutted Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act in his Shelby County decision, removing federal oversight. Georgia wasted no time ramping up more suppressive measures.
In 2017, then Secretary of State Kemp purged 560,000 people from the rolls on grounds of “infrequent voting,” according to American Public Media. This number was unusually high, and many accused Kemp of manipulating the electorate in advance of his run for governor. These voter purges had an impact in 2018 when Stacey Abrams ran against him: The purged voters were more likely to live in Democratic precincts with nearly 47 percent of them were in precincts Abrams carried by more than 10 percentage points, compared to 43 percent in heavily Republican areas according to the APM study.
In the final month of the gubernatorial campaign, voting rights groups has to sue Kemp over an “exact match” policy that held up over 53,000 registrations, mostly minorities, over small typos, missing apostrophes, and hyphens. It failed to sort itself out in time.
On Election Day, wait times in some of the most heavily African-American populated counties in Georgia saw numerous problems resulting from the purge, the exact match issue, broken machinery, and limited polling stations. Minority voters would often get to the front of the line only to be told their names did not appear in the voter rolls. Many were sent to multiple polling stations to try and resolve their status, each with long lines.
Abrams lost the election and ended her campaign, but she refused to concede, stating that the election was fundamentally unfair. She founded Fair Fight to help battle against the many attempts by the GOP in her state to suppress votes.
She has had her work cut out for her. Once again, in December of 2019, the number of registered voters in Georgia shrank by over 300,000 due to a contested but court-sanctioned purge of voters, which was done on grounds of “list maintenance,” according to the Washington Post. And in December of 2020, Judge Leslie Abrams Gardner, who is Stacey Abrams’ sister, blocked the last minute invalidation of the registrations of over 4,000 voters who had been flagged for having changed their addresses.
So long as the GOP controls both the legislature and the governorship in Georgia, these types of measures likely will continue, at least until the federal government can step back in with oversight. While the GOP professes to make these changes as part of “election integrity,” the long history of voter suppression in that state, coupled with the sudden need after losing three key elections to change the very rules the GOP itself implemented around things like mail-in voting, strongly belie these claims.
It does appear we are in for a showdown here. If I work the next election I may need hazardous pay. The last two were pretty brutal with the awesome turnout, and I loved it for the laughs, and most for all the young first-time voters. They were awesome!