One of many things Georgia’s new voting law, the discussions in the Georgia legislature that produced the law, the reactions to the law, and the reactions to the reactions to the law have all demonstrated are how much we can all lie these days: To ourselves. To each other. The Georgia law is not “Jim Crow on steroids,” as President Joe Biden claimed. It is also not going to cut down on “mass voter fraud,” as is its purported purpose, because mass voter fraud does not exist in the United States (as evidenced by the absence of a shred of evidence of its existence being produced in the dozens of lawsuits addressing the matter last fall). It creates that silly ban on third parties giving water to voters, but it doesn’t really ban that (it only applies within 150 feet of a polling place or 25 feet of a voter), and it allows poll workers to provide a self-serve water cooler to those waiting in line.
Yesterday, as notifications about Major League Baseball pulling the All-Star Game out of Cobb County popped up on my phone, I realized I didn’t know what was in the law. I’d heard reaction upon reaction…but little about the measures themselves. Perhaps you’re in the same boat. If so, here are two rundowns: One, a summary from the New York Times; The other, a reaction from The Dispatch (if you’re unfamiliar with The Dispatch, it’s a fact-based conservative outlet). Each comes through the lens you’d expect: The New York Times piece focuses on the changes made, ignoring, at least off the top, how the new voting apparatus as a whole compares to that of other states; The Dispatch focuses on how the new voting apparatus compares to that of other states while neglecting to spend much time on the fact that the law is a rather brazenly politically motivated attempt to make it harder to vote than was previously the case.
These are the core two pieces of the dishonesty. On one side of the debate (and there are only two sides, it seems, believe it or not), people ignore that the law leaves voting in Georgia not unreasonably difficult. On the other side of the debate, people ignore that the law, even if smaller than its proponents and detractors have made it out to be, is an attempt to help one party win elections by limiting the total number of votes cast.
The overblowing aspect—the “smaller than its proponents and detractors have made it out to be” part—is telling. Many Democrats want Republicans to try to restrict voting, believing it to be fodder for their electoral chances and justification for their hate. Many Republicans want Republicans to try to restrict voting, brainwashed by a media ecosystem that’s convinced them that voter fraud is rampant and responsible for the electoral defeat of their political messiah. Each side wants this law to be massive in scope, because if the law is massive in scope, it riles up each side’s “base” and plays into each side’s oversimplistic rhetoric: “Republicans don’t want Black people to vote.” “Democrats want it to be easy to cheat.” But at least one of the more egregiously racially-targeted measures—banning early voting on Sundays, which would have hampered Black churches’ attempts to help people vote—was not included in the law. The law does appear designed to limit voting by racial minorities, but it does so in the same way that minority voting is limited in all those other states where voting is more difficult than in Georgia, like New York, to name a popularly-cited example—by making it that much more difficult. When voting is that much more difficult, the idea is that working class people and people in poverty will not have the resources—time, money, energy—to get to the polls, and I don’t need to tell you about the correlation between income and race in this country. Effectively, it’s racially targeted, and that’s a terrible thing. But this is a broad, disingenuous but probably legal (we’ll see what the courts say) way to do it, and it does leave room for activists to overcome it, though they too will have to work that much harder. The bottom line is that while this appears, undeniably, to be an effort to limit minority voting, Jim Crow, this is not.
Personally, the most troubling pieces of the law seem to be the legislature’s demotion of Georgia’s secretary of state within the election board and the legislature’s seizure of the power to remove county election officials. As Jon Fasman wrote yesterday in Checks and Balance, a weekly newsletter from The Economist about American politics:
There are some more worrying measures. The bill replaces the elected Secretary of State as head of the election board with someone appointed by the legislature, which smacks of retribution against Brad Raffensperger, who withstood Donald Trump’s pressure to overturn the election. It also increases the state’s power to remove county election officials it deems poor performers. Perhaps the state will use that power to remove genuinely incompetent officials. But some worry they will use it to cripple election boards in the populous, Democratic-leaning counties around Atlanta.
Voting is more difficult in Georgia than it was prior to the law’s passage. But activists can work through that, just as they worked through a pandemic to drive record turnout this November. What’s more concerning is that the law could be used by legislators, many of whom have pushed and continue to push thoroughly debunked claims of a “stolen election,” to try to steal an election, or to at least delegitimize it through more official channels than were used this go-round. There’s little evidence that the bill will actually reduce turnout. It’s a bunch of thorns in voters’ sides, but it isn’t a guillotine in front of the ballot box. But the new route towards the continued delegitimization of the electoral process in voters’ eyes is concerning.
As far as the reactions go…
It’s not the worst thing if corporations, driven by their markets, decide that any efforts to restrict the ease of voting are intolerable. If the free market strongarms governments into not inhibiting citizens’ voting options…that doesn’t sound too dystopian to me. I understand that there’s a hypocrisy present in boycotting a state over voting rights when it’s easier to vote in that state than in many where a corporation does do business. But there is a difference, unacknowledged on one side of this debate, between keeping voting as is and making it harder than it recently was. Backlash, to some extent, against making voting harder is warranted. Reasonable disagreements should be had about the extent.
It’s also not the worst thing if consumers, furious about hypocrisy, boycott corporations for boycotting a state over voting rights when the state in question does, in fact, leave it easier to vote than in many states where the corporations still do business. But boycotters claiming they’ll no longer watch Major League Baseball should be wary of their own hypocrisy. If the comparison is to corporations’ treatment of China—a fair one to bring up, given the Chinese government is, at this very moment, committing genocide—they better not have a Disney Plus subscription, and they better not buy products from Gap, Adidas, Tommy Hilfiger, Calvin Klein, etc., or shop at virtually any major retailer in the United States, given that doing so indirectly supports the Chinese economy and thereby indirectly supports genocide. If someone’s boycotting all those things and making a principled stand to not economically support anything they believe to be wrong, then sure, go ahead and don’t go to your annual ballpark outing this year. But if they’re pounding their chest about their opposition to Major League Baseball while wearing something made by Nike or Puma, they’re likely just trying to impress themselves.
What will happen? I have no way to say.
What should happen? We should support making voting easier, and if we desire to make it more secure, we should accompany those measures with commensurate measures to make sure the changes do not, on the aggregate, make it harder for anyone to vote. We should hold people accountable for trying to infringe upon or otherwise delegitimize the American electoral process. But we should also be honest about what those infringements are. The fact that this last part—the honesty about what’s even happening—is such a far-fetched idea on both sides of this particular argument is yet another sad touchstone. We’re a long way from honesty. All over the place.
