Georgia state Rep. Park Cannon, whose arrest in the Georgia Capitol Building went viral for its embodying the racist policy being enacted by the Republican state legislature, returned to work on Monday. She entered the State Capitol in Atlanta with her arm in a sling, accompanied by Martin Luther King III and backed by a number of activists wearing shirts that said “Stand With Park.”
She was injured but undeterred, defiant and not defeated by the incident last Thursday in which she was arrested and thrown in jail for knocking on the door to Gov. Brian Kemp’s office as he signed a bill codifying deeply racist voter suppression.
Over the weekend, Cannon, a 29-year-old queer-identifying legislator considered a rising star in Georgia politics, released this statement:
Voting is a constitutional right guaranteed to every person over the age of 18 born not only in Georgia but in every corner of the United States. To limit that right is to go against our Constitution and the ideals of the Founding Fathers that Conservative Georgians hold so dear. So, it confuses and concerns me that those same Conservative Lawmakers that are now fighting so hard to limit and suppress the voting rights of all Georgians, but specifically black and brown voters, a population of voters who have historically been disenfranchised in this state. SB 202 will tighten voter ID requirements, a problem that already disproportionately affects black and brown voters, and will also restrict where, how, and when voters may return absentee ballots, a system used overwhelmingly by all Georgia voters this last year due to the COVID-19 crisis. I will not stand by while our voting rights are threatened across this state, the state I swore an oath to represent with integrity, honesty, and respect for the millions of people who live and work in this community.
Instead of intimidating activists, Cannon’s arrest has further motivated them. Republicans in Georgia, sore after losing three major elections, terrified of the state’s shifting demographics, and fueled by deep-seated nihilism and racism, last week enacted a broad set of new voting regulations designed explicitly to make it harder for people of color and poor people to vote.
Some of those limitations in SB 2020 have already made the headlines and drawn broad condemnation — the ban on giving water to voters waiting in long lines, in particular, stands out for its overt cruelty and obvious targets. There are plenty of others, though, that will have a far greater impact on election turnout; you just need to know where to look, what they mean, and how they combine with other policies to specifically target Black voters. I wrote this guide with the help of a major voting rights activist in Georgia:
The Ban on Mobile Voting
Chief Justice John Roberts justified his decision to gut the Voting Rights Act in 2013 by asserting that things had “dramatically changed” in the south since the heyday of Jim Crow, thereby rendering the preclearance requirement obsolete. Southern states immediately began proving Roberts wrong, giddily closing over 1200 polling places in less than a decade. I doubt he was all that upset to have his words discredited.
Georgia, under the leadership of Brian Kemp, who served as secretary of state before being elected governor, has led the way, shutting down more than 200 of its polling places even as over two million people were added to the voter rolls. As you can probably guess, a very disproportionate number of those closed polling places were in more urban counties, where a majority of Georgia’s Black voters live.
These nine counties are home to just about 50% of the state’s voters but have just 38% of the voting locations. It was even more disproportionate during the January Senate run-off elections, as a number of these counties, including Cobb County, shut down additional polling places, which were again predominantly in Black neighborhoods.
As a way to alleviate some of the egregiously long wait times for voters, Fulton County, home to Atlanta, got permission a few years ago to run two mobile voting sites, which each had eight to ten voting stations. Two busses circled the city for weeks and weeks before an election, often stopping at churches and community centers, allowing voters to walk up and cast their ballots. They drastically shortening the wait time many faced, and now, those busses have been all but taken off the streets.
“Fulton County is the only county that uses mobile buses and now there must be a specified emergency declared for a mobile voting bus to even be considered,” explains Aklima Khondoker, the head of the Georgia chapter of All Voting Is Local. “The emergency has to be a risk to health and safety, declared by the governor. And then if a county is allowed to consider that, then they still have to have that bus tethered to a previously closed early voting location. So you can't just have an open voting bus available to ease the pressure off voters and help county election workers.”
As it stands, it’s unlikely that Gov. Kemp, who gained a national profile for his prolific — and very often racist and inaccurate — voter purges, will be all that interested in declaring many emergencies.
Boxing Up the Drop Boxes
Voting by mail is another important antidote to polling place congestion, which made it a natural target for the GOP. Instead of just demolishing it in one fell swoop, Republican legislators instead took the death by 1000 cuts approach, undermining vote-by-mail to the point that far fewer voters will want or be able to use it.
Ballot drop boxes were implemented last spring during the pandemic when the state Election Board voted unanimously to approve them on a temporary basis. SB 202 codified their ongoing existence into law, but severely curtailed their numbers and utility in — yep, you guessed it — bluer counties that have more minority voters.
Election experts recommend that jurisdictions install one drop box per 10,000 registered voters; SB 202 limits them to one drop box per 100,000 voters or one per early voting site, whichever is lower. And whereas drop boxes used to be publicly accessible 24 hours a day, they’re now required to be stuck inside early voting sites, which operate on limited days and hours.
“Drop boxes provided an alternative for people who do not have an early vote site, who may not have the money to pay for a stamp, or may not have access to a mailbox or a US Postal Service,” Khondoker says. “So a free-standing drop box is a free and secure alternative to not having that early vote site, as most of the closures that we've seen have been in black and brown communities.”
Hobbling the Mail-In Vote
Sending a ballot in just got harder, as well.
The drastic slowdown of the USPS mail delivery last summer and fall meant that people in other states often received their absentee ballots later than expected, prompting them to use drop boxes instead of taking the risk that their filled-in ballot might not return in time for the Election Day deadline.
Georgia mitigated that risk by allowing voters to request a ballot up to 180 days before Election Day, a provision that the legislature just cut by three-quarters. Now, voters can request a ballot beginning just 45 days before an election — if they have the required paperwork, which represents another onerous provision in the law.
Whereas mail ballot requests were once authenticated by signature verification, which is considered the gold standard, SB 202 created a new ID requirement that demands the final four numbers of a driver’s license or another state ID.
For many people, that doesn’t seem like a problem, but as Khondoker points out, Georgia is largely rural outside the Atlanta metro area, making DMVs far less accessible to many people. And while drivers’ license ID numbers can be swapped out for photocopies of a few other designated forms of identification, that is its own burden and form of poll tax.
“Georgia took six different kinds of ID because there was an understanding that not everybody has a driver's license — if you're a member of a tribal community, perhaps you just have that tribal ID, and if you’re a student, maybe you just have a student ID, and both of those are an acceptable form of identification to vote [in person],” she says. “This ostensibly pushes you out of the process that makes it easier for you to request your ballot. Now you are required to have a scanner, a photocopier, or some other electronic means to justify your requesting your ballot.”
Hijacking the Election Board
Drop boxes were approved by a unanimous vote of the State Election Board, which was controlled by Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. He’s no great friend to voting rights, but Raffensperger’s willingness to stand up to Donald Trump’s desperate fading mob boss demand that he find over 12,000 votes and flip the state red made him a brief hero to liberals and one of the more reasonable Republicans in Georgia. It also made him enemy number one of the cuckoo MAGA-heads that dominate the state legislature, who used SB 202 to strip him of his chairmanship of the state Board (among other indignities).
Now, the legislature will choose the chair of the State Election Board, who will operate without judicial oversight. The State Election Board chair can hire and fire election superintendents, who make a majority of the decisions in counties, including where and how many precincts and polling sites there are in each election.
The legislature will be permitted to seize control of local county election boards, too, theoretically providing far-right partisans almost total power over the particulars of any local election.
This will make it far more inviting to challenge ballots, which just so happens to now be permitted on an unlimited basis. Remember those whack jobs screaming at harassing vote counters and election workers last year during the recount? Get ready for a lot more of that. And if a Democrat does win, there’s a chance they won’t certify the election, either.
So Now What?