4/2/21
It wasn’t so long ago that disenfranchised Blacks and activist Whites were beaten and killed for attempting to secure the right to vote. Among the better-known victims were civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, three young men who were abducted, shot at close range and buried in an earthen Mississippi dam on June 21, 1964. This incident was but one of many leading up to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but is illustrative of how bloody and hard-won the right to vote was. We’ve come a long way, as they say, but some people are still determined to make voting more, not less, difficult. Georgia’s recent 98-page voting reform legislation, signed into law on March 25 by Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, is a case in point. These red-clay legislators don’t require a literacy test, but they’ve created a host of new regulations that potentially make voting more difficult for minorities. Absentee ballots are more difficult to obtain; drop boxes for mail ballots will become nearly nonexistent; photo-ID requirements are potentially prohibitive; Sunday voting hours are now left to local election boards to regulate and food and water can’t be offered to people standing in line waiting to vote. While Republicans insist their efforts are aimed at enhancing voting “integrity,” they’re operating under the false premise, otherwise known as the Big Lie.
Why the rush to restrict the right to vote? In a word: midterms. They’re around the corner, and Republicans hope to flip one of the two Senate seats from Georgia that they lost in the January runoff. Sen. Raphael G. Warnock, a Democrat from Atlanta, is up for reelection, most likely against his former opponent, Kelly Loeffler, who is already busy registering and mobilizing Republicans. A multimillionaire White woman playing voting-rights activist to a Black preacher from the “City Too Busy to Hate.” The new law doesn’t ban Sunday voting, but it does allow Georgia’s 159 counties to reduce or eliminate it. This is a maneuver that threatens to suppress the Black vote, but it is done in a way that allows state legislators to put the blame somewhere else. Since at least the 1990s, African Americans have often voted together, after church on the Sunday before Election Day, for reasons of safety and solidarity. The provision against providing food and water (ostensibly to prevent electioneering) is just cruel. Lines are long and can take hours in some precincts of some states, in part because state and county election officials have been active in recent years limiting the number of polling places — another backdoor way to diminish minority turnout. The KKK may be underground these days; but Georgia’s stab is a wound to the heart and soul of a nation in recovery.
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