Major League Baseball announced that it is pulling its marquee mid-summer event, the All-Star Game and Amateur Draft, from Atlanta over Georgia Republicans’ racist new voter suppression bill.
Check out the below:
“Over the last week, we have engaged in thoughtful conversations with Clubs, former and current players, the Players Association, and The Players Alliance, among others, to listen to their views. I have decided that the best way to demonstrate our values as a sport is by relocating this year’s All-Star Game and MLB Draft.
“Major League Baseball fundamentally supports voting rights for all Americans and opposes restrictions to the ballot box. In 2020, MLB became the first professional sports league to join the non-partisan Civic Alliance to help build a future in which everyone participates in shaping the United States. We proudly used our platform to encourage baseball fans and communities throughout our country to perform their civic duty and actively participate in the voting process. Fair access to voting continues to have our game’s unwavering support.
“We will continue with our plans to celebrate the memory of Hank Aaron during this season’s All-Star festivities. In addition, MLB’s planned investments to support local communities in Atlanta as part of our All-Star Legacy Projects will move forward. We are finalizing a new host city and details about these events will be announced shortly.”
It took a while and a whole lot of public pressure (including from Black executives), corporations are starting to come out strong against Georgia’s horrible racist law.
Delta and Coca-Cola both issued statements on Wednesday decrying the suppression, calling it “unacceptable” and “based on a lie,” among other things. As expected, that sparked a backlash from GOP lawmakers in the legislature, but they ultimately did not pass any revenge taxes or other punitive laws. After all, these are corporations, not people of color — Republicans don’t want to actually hurt them.
Incidentally, this will also hurt Braves’ owner John Malone, the right-wing media mogul and founder of Liberty Media, who won’t cash in on the revenue from the events and the spotlight. The Braves’ ballpark, Truist Park, was built largely by Cobb County, which spent $400 million on the project. It’s also being used by Kelly Loeffler for a kickoff event for her big voter suppression group.
Let’s be clear, though: This decision wasn’t exactly a product of a bunch of MLB owners really caring about racial equality and voting access. Major League Baseball players have the strongest union in pro sports and they have been very outspoken about this new law. And for good reason.
SB 202, as the bill is officially known, did not wind up outright banning Georgians from no-excuse absentee voting, nor did it shut down Sunday early voting (at least not during November general elections). Those two big-ticket items were kept out of the final bill by activists across the state, but the law as passed is still loaded with robust anti-democratic measures and limitations.
Some of those limitations 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.
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.
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