The rich and powerful use racism to protect their interests and scapegoat communities of color. But there is an effective way to talk about both race and class when organizing for multiracial democracy.
This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.
The United States Supreme Court has upheld two controversial election laws in Arizona that voting rights advocates say will hurt the ability of voters in marginalized communities to cast their ballots.
Beyond its impact on Arizona voting laws, however, the case was also seen by many as a test of the remaining powers of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and whether the Court would uphold one of its provisions to protect voters of color in that state and elsewhere in the future.
The 6-3 decision, voted along partisan lines, in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee examined two types of voting restrictions: the first requiring election officials to discard ballots cast by voters who showed up at the wrong precincts; and the second making it a crime for anyone other than family members, caregivers or election officials to turn in a person’s absentee ballot to polling places.
The two changes to voting rules were initially challenged in 2016. Last year, the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that the law was unconstitutional. But the Supreme Court, in its ruling today, overturned that decision, and found that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act — which forbids changes to state’s election laws if they result in “a denial or abridgment of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race” — could not be applied to this case.
The decision could make it more difficult for challenges to restrictive voting laws in the future. Last week, the Department of Justice announced it would challenge state laws that create additional burdens to voting, but the ruling on Thursday will undoubtedly narrow to what extent the Voting Rights Act can be used for such challenges.
“Today, the Court undermines Section 2 and the right it provides,” Justice Elena Kagan said in her dissent to the majority opinion. “The majority fears that the statute Congress wrote is too ‘radical’ — that it will invalidate too many state voting laws.”
Recalling how the conservative bloc of justices had gutted a different provision of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, Kagan added:
What is tragic here is that the Court has (yet again) rewritten — in order to weaken — a statute that stands as a monument to America’s greatness, and protects against its basest impulses. What is tragic is that the Court has damaged a statute designed to bring about ‘the end of discrimination in voting.’
Voting rights advocates were similarly critical of the court’s majority opinion.
“We are fighting against the most concerted state-based effort to undermine Black voting strength since the Civil Rights Mvmt,” tweeted Sherrilyn Ifill, president and CEO of the Legal Defense and Educational Fund at the NAACP. “And in that context, the Supreme Court has again, & w/abandon, shredded a core provision of the Voting Rights Act.”
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) also decried the Supreme Court’s majority opinion. “If you believe in open and fair democracy and the principle of one person, one vote, today is one of the darkest days in all of the Supreme Court’s history,” he said.
The ruling by the Court will add urgency to the Democrats’ push to pass the For the People Act, a bill that would enact many voting rights and elections reforms. However, a Senate filibuster by Republicans would likely block passage of the bill, and centrist Democrats have signaled they are unwilling to change filibuster rules in order to pass it, in spite of the fact that a majority of American voters favor doing so.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
If the Democratic coalition remains reliant on well-to-do suburbanites reluctant to accept taxes on the rich, the new Popular Front strategy will fall short.
This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.
Here we go again. Following in the footsteps of states like Georgia, Florida, and Arizona, North Carolina is moving full speed ahead on legislation deceptively entitled the “Election Integrity Act.” Like similarly titled bills in those other states, it is designed to make it harder to vote, particularly for voters of color. The measure, S.B. 326, was approved by the state senate’s Redistricting and Elections Committee on Wednesday. It’s now heading towards a vote by the full state senate and is expected to be considered by the house as early as next week.
It is part of a nationwide, GOP-led backlash to robust turnout by Black, brown, and Indigenous voters in 2020. Like similar bills, North Carolina’s targets voting by mail, which some 1 million North Carolinians relied on to cast their ballots in 2020. S.B. 326 would make this harder by reducing the time to request and return an absentee ballot. Had its provisions been in place last year, tens of thousands of applications and ballots would have been rejected.
North Carolina voters, especially voters of color, have long been targets of legislative voter suppression. I stood with them as counsel in a successful challenge to a massive voter suppression law that a federal appeals court concluded targeted African Americans with “almost surgical precision” in 2016. Voter advocates are not taking this latest assault sitting down either, packing the state senate hearing room to give testimony on S.B. 326.
Unfortunately, many were unable to testify, as the committee waited until 10 minutes before adjournment to bring up this bill. But several advocates were able to speak, including Desmera Gatewood of Democracy North Carolina, who called out the Jim Crow underpinnings of the bill’s “election integrity” frame.
“As a Black person, I’m probably the most qualified to speak to integrity of the ballot process,” she said, pointing to the unending stream of historic and recent barriers directed at voters of color in North Carolina, and calling on lawmakers to abide by the 15th Amendment’s guarantee that the right to vote not be abridged due to race.
But it’s clear that this is exactly what would happen, as S.B. 326 would constrict the mail voting process in North Carolina by reducing the time to request and return an absentee ballot in a way that disproportionately harms voters of color.
Under existing law in place for more than a decade, voters in North Carolina can request an absentee ballot until one week before Election Day. The bill would move that deadline from 7 days before Election Day to 14 days, or two weeks, before Election Day. Because interest increases closer to an election, many voters tend to request ballots in the week eliminated by this bill.
S.B. 326 bill also shortens the window to return a ballot by removing a safeguard allowing absentee ballots to count if they are postmarked by Election Day and received within 3 days after. This grace period — which has been in place since 2009 — means that voters aren’t punished for postal delays beyond their control. S.B. 326 would require all ballots to be received by the election authority by 5 p.m. on Election Day, regardless of when the voter mails it. Voters who complete and get their ballots in the mail by Election Day should have their ballots count just like other voters.
One recent poll found that a majority of North Carolina voters oppose this change. It is important to note that the existing grace period doesn’t hinder the vote count. Election results are not finalized in North Carolina on election night but during the statewide county canvass 10 days later. State election data shows that, excluding military and overseas voters, in 2020, 13,654 ballots were postmarked by Election Day and received within 3 days after. Those ballots would be rejected under this bill.
One recent study by Western Carolina University found that had the request and return restrictions in S.B. 326 been in place in 2020, 31,680 ballots in North Carolina would have been rejected. Had the proposed provisions been in place in 2016, almost 24,000 ballots would have been rejected. The study also found that the rejected ballots would have been disproportionately from African American voters, younger voters, and registered unaffiliated voters, who were all more likely to request ballots during the final week removed by S.B. 326 and more likely to have a ballot that postmarked by Election Day that was received after Election Day.
Worse, the bill contains no funding to educate voters about these changes — changes that are likely to cause confusion among voters accustomed to requesting ballots a week before Election Day and having until Election Day to get them back in the mail. Lawmakers previously saw fit to allocate over $2 million to educate voters about important voting changes.
Without any state funding at all, the burden will then fall to local election authorities, who — outrageously — would also be prohibited by S.B. 326’s provisions from receiving any private funds to help get the voters the information they need.
Wednesday’s committee vote takes this bill closer to approval. Instead of passing a misguided “Election Integrity Act,” North Carolina lawmakers should instead recognize the integrity of the voters they represent and reject this burdensome measure.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Over the past couple months, GOP legislators in several states have passed legislation purportedly intended to protect the integrity of the vote. In reality, these bills — which GOP governors in Arizona, Georgia, Texas, Florida, Iowa, and elsewhere, have rushed to sign — contain poison pill provisions that make it harder for residents to vote. Less publicized is that they also contain a number provisions that make poll workers and other election officials legally liable for small, unintentional errors of process that could occur at the polls or in the distribution of ballots.
The laws are aimed at making the voting process more cumbersome, and at making the election process more manipulable for partisan advantage.
In Iowa, for example, a new law mandates that polls close at 8pm instead of 9pm, thus reducing the time that many people have to vote after work. There’s no good reason for that; it’s simply intended to make it harder to vote. The law also reduces the number of days for early voting, limits the number of drop-boxes for ballots to one per county, and mandates that counties only send absentee ballots out to voters who explicitly request them. As a part of this package, legislators made it a felony offense for county auditors — the people in charge of the county elections machinery — to violate any of these provisions, even accidentally.
In Georgia, where legislators attracted national attention after making it a crime to provide water to people waiting in line to vote, new laws allow the partisan State Election Board, controlled by Republicans, to replace county election officials they deem not to be doing a good job, and the law then allows those newly appointed county officials to fire other election workers in their jurisdiction.
In Florida, Arizona, Texas, and several other states, election officials now face the possibility of fines of up to $25,000 and/or jail time for an array of very minor offenses, such as allowing drop-boxes to be left unsupervised or operable outside of early voting hours, failing to ask for proof of citizenship from would-be-voters who have been flagged as being potentially ineligible to vote, and mailing out absentee ballots to voters who haven’t requested them.
All told, according to a New York Times analysis, nine states have already increased the penalties against elections workers who intentionally or accidentally get on the wrong side of these new rules. Others are likely to follow suit.
As the GOP passes ever-more expansive rules aimed at sabotaging the electoral process, democracy advocates are growing increasingly concerned that these laws will scare away not only potential voters but also critical numbers of poll workers, the vast majority of whom are citizen-volunteers, as well as salaried officials who have spent decades building up knowledge of how the often-arcane election machinery in their counties and states works.
Obviously, says Derek Tisler, a fellow at the New York-based Brennan Center’s Democracy Program, one wants local election officials to follow state law, but, he says, these new laws are being passed in such a clearly partisan context and amid such a flurry of disinformation that he worries they will be used not to promote best practices but instead to simply “chill election officials,” scaring them away from creating the sorts of user-friendly voting systems that were adopted in the face of the pandemic and that resulted in record levels of voter turnout last November. “It’s a really disturbing trend,” Tisler explains.
In non-pandemic years, state officials know that a majority of their election volunteers will be elderly. When the pandemic hit, finding poll workers became a particular problem, as the elderly are the most vulnerable demographic. In the run-up to last year’s elections, state officials scrambled to convince tens of thousands of volunteers to put aside fears of personal safety about COVID, and to staff polling stations and do other election-related work around the country. Private companies urged their employees to step up. Sports franchises converted their arena into early voting sites and urged fans to volunteer. By the thousands, people responded, many of them far younger than the average age of poll workers in years past. It was an extraordinary outpouring of public service.
Now, however, that renewed civic engagement is under direct threat. After all, why volunteer to help run an election if you risk huge financial penalties or even jail time if you misinterpret a state election law provision?
If states end up facing poll worker shortages, at the end of the day voters suffer. There’s a risk, says Tisler, that there will be “fewer polling places, longer wait times, not enough people to assist them or offer guidance.” Paradoxically, he continues, these laws that are ostensibly meant to rein in errors will likely lead to more mistakes being made, as overworked poll workers try to do too much with too few resources.
Monitors have already noticed a brain drain of election officials leaving their jobs in Pennsylvania, a state where, in the months preceding and following the November 2020 elections, officials were routinely harassed and threatened by political partisans, and accused of putting their fingers on the scales to tip the election against Trump.
After Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds signed a bill that included $10,000 fines for “technical infractions” such as accidentally opening a poll station a few minutes late, local officials warned that they could see an exodus of election workers as a result.
Tisler says that he has also encountered stories of officials in Michigan, Wisconsin and Georgia deciding to either retire early or to seek other jobs in county departments outside of the field of elections. And he worries that, in the face of harassment, misinformation and now legislation that criminalizes commonplace mistakes, many of the most experienced volunteer poll workers — the ones who can be relied on year in year out to show up for Election Day — will decide it’s no longer worth it in 2022 or 2024.
“We need to build public awareness — get people to understand the impact these laws could have, and the impact on voters,” Tisler says. “We need to get to a place where public leaders have a commitment to democratic fairness.”
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Over the weekend, the Virginia Republican Party held its convention at which it was supposed to choose its candidates for the off-year election this fall. The three top candidates for governor have been described as “Trumpy, Trumpier and Trumpiest,” so you can easily see where Virginia Republicans are positioning themselves in the GOP circular firing squad. In their zeal to model their allegiance to their Ultimate Leader, Republicans went out of their way to restrict the voting process to assure “the integrity” of the vote. According to NBC News’ Alex Seitz-Wald it didn’t go very well:
At issue is a decision to quietly allow voters to participate in their complicated primary process even if they left blank parts of the application, including required fields that asked for their state-issued voter ID number and a signature, according to documents and an audio recording of a call obtained exclusively by NBC News. Republicans in the state say the nominating contest has been a logistical nightmare.
Their own activists couldn’t traverse all of the GOP’s newly-imposed “voter integrity” verifications. Evidently, a whole bunch of people didn’t know how to do fill out the necessary paperwork so they left it whole portions blank which, under the new strict vote-counting rules the Republicans are pushing, should result in throwing out the ballot or registration form.
The right-wing gubernatorial candidate who calls herself “Trump in heels,” (and is widely considered the Trumpiest of the lot) Amanda Chase is not standing for it. She wrote this to her supporters:
“DO NOT TRUST THE PARTY TO DELIVER ACCURATE RESULTS. Who should you go to for the proper results? Me and my campaign! My campaign will be monitoring the voting and data entry on election night. If they are accurate, we will tell you. If they are not, I will be prepared to sue in court to force a public count.”
She means it:
Radical right-wing Virginia state senator Amanda Chase says that if she does not emerge from the GOP’s nominating convention today as the Republican candidate for governor, she’ll demand an audit of the vote. pic.twitter.com/xSrxunOnlu
— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) May 8, 2021
They don’t expect the vote to be fully tabulated for some time and since it’s a ranked-choice voting process, there will undoubtedly be a runoff. Is there any doubt that Chase will deny the validity of the vote count if she doesn’t make the runoff? After all, she is the Trumpiest and we know what that means:
He won that year. And we all know what happened when, four years later, he didn’t.
So judging from what’s going on with election laws around the country and the lockstep belief among the faithful, I think it’s fair to assume that we can expect more of it. As you can see from the Virginia example, one problem with these draconian voting restrictions is that they will affect Republican voters the same way they will affect the Democrats. It’s possible they’ll affect them even more since the GOP has been pushing absentee voting for years for their older constituents, the very people who may be most confused by the changes. Perversely, that will provide even more fodder for the losers to contest the election results and further degrade their own voters’ faith in the system. After all, the last election results were certified by Republican officials and Republican judges all over the country, yet Republican voters still believe it was fraudulent. It won’t matter in 2022 and 2024 that it was Republicans who instituted the rules that disadvantage their own voters.
Keep in mind that the new voting restrictions are not where this ends.
Republicans are also doing their usual tricks of “purging” voters from the rolls and “caging.” But there are some newer very troubling moves, starting with the new expansive rules in 20 states for “poll watchers” which basically means that fanatical Republican extremists will be free to harass and intimidate voters as they are trying to cast a vote. This technique is thought to be more effective in precincts with more minority voters but Republicans may be surprised. Everyone knows what they’re up to now so Democrats are highly unlikely to be intimidated by MAGA loyalists at the ballot box.
Because we are also seeing the entire party from Ted Cruz, R-Tx., and Marjorie Taylor Green, R-Ga, to House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., all buying into the notion that Trump’s Jan. 6th gambit to overturn the election was legitimate, it’s clear that’s become conventional wisdom in the GOP as well. At this point, it appears that they have all decided to treat the insurrection itself as a somewhat overzealous but nonetheless valid response to having had the election “stolen.”
Trump made a serious run at getting the election overturned. He cared nothing for legitimacy, openly and blatantly threatened, cajoled and intimidated state and local elections officials to refuse to certify the results based upon sloppily made-up evidence and conspiracy theories. For months he bellowed that mail-in votes were fraudulent and 6 weeks before the election he stated outright that he wanted Amy Coney Barrett confirmed because he expected the court to decide the election and he needed that extra vote just in case.
As it happened those local officials and judges around the country refused to cooperate. Today those officials are all being purged from the party. All these voter “integrity” bills will eventually be challenged and we’ll see if the courts are still independent or if conservative jurists are now on the Trump train as well. After all, it all seemed like a stunning assault on our tradition of a peaceful transfer of power at the time. Something like this had never happened before. Will they feel the same way if it happens again?
Even more unnerving is the growing perception that all this supposed “rigging” leaves the GOP with no choice but to refuse to vote to certify any more presidential elections if they have the power to do it. There is unfortunately a decent chance that McCarthy might just be the Speaker of the House in 2025 and if Trump is on the ballot, as he probably will be, does anyone believe he would dare defy him again?
pretty clear at this point that if Republicans control Congress in 2024 a Democrat will not be allowed to win the presidential election. simple as that https://t.co/ujMm5ifn3U
— ryan cooper (@ryanlcooper) May 10, 2021
It is almost inevitable that “stop the steal” will be an ongoing GOP rallying cry.
Whatever misgivings the Republican establishment may have had about Donald Trump’s strategy to usurp democracy, they have rapidly come around to being his servile minions once again. With three more years of banging this drum, the Trump cult will be thoroughly convinced that it is literally impossible for them to legitimately lose elections. And GOP officials will be happy to let them believe that as long it means they can stay in power.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Republicans are waging a nationwide attack on voting rights and the right to protest. Kelly Hayes compares these efforts with the laws and conventions that ushered in the Jim Crow era, and talks with voting rights organizer Toni Watkins about how targeted communities are fighting back.
Note: This a rush transcript and has been lightly edited for clarity. Copy may not be in its final form.
Music by Son Monarcas
Kelly Hayes: Welcome to “Movement Memos,” a Truthout podcast about things you should know if you want to change the world. I’m your host, Kelly Hayes.
Since the beginning of the year, Republicans in 47 states have introduced at least 361 bills that would make it harder to vote. Five restrictive bills have already been signed into law and 29 others have passed at least one legislative chamber. These laws are part of a Republican long game to ensure white dominance in the U.S., but they have also been fueled by popular myths about a stolen election, and by a bitter backlash against the accomplishments of Black and brown organizers who scored historic victories in the 2020 elections. One of those organizers is today’s guest, Toni Watkins. Toni is an organizer with the New Georgia Project. She’s also an author, producer, political strategist, and much more. Toni Watkins, welcome to the show.
Toni Watkins: Thank you. I’m so excited to be here.
KH: How are you doing today?
TW: Doing well. It is a beautiful day in Georgia, so it’s awesome.
KH: Well, I am so glad you could be here today, because the assault on voting rights in the U.S. Is nothing short of horrifying, and I know we all have so much to learn from the work that your community has been doing. As a jumping off point, can you tell our listeners, who may not be familiar with the New Georgia Project, what kind of work you all do?
TW: Yeah, definitely. So the New Georgia Project, I will probably refer to it after this as NGP, is a 501(C)(3). We have a (C)(4) side, that’s the New Georgia Project Action Fund, but NGP is all about voter engagement and mobilization, so we work really, really hard to educate voters, inform voters, and help bridge gaps that people may have in casting their votes.
KH: I do want to take a moment to give people just a bit of historical grounding here. Because to a lot of people, the sweeping attacks on voting rights that we’re seeing may feel new or sudden because the media has done a terrible job of covering what Republicans have been up to over the last decade, and our educational system has done a terrible job of breaking down what white people have been up to over the course of this country’s entire history.
I was fortunate enough to attend a teach-in recently called Voting Rights Under Attack!, hosted by The Frontline, where you were actually a panelist, and Pam Spees, an attorney at The Center for Constitutional Rights, offered some important historical framing that I would like to share with our listeners. Pam explained that we can see parallels to what we’re experiencing now to over a hundred years ago when panicked white men held the Louisiana Constitutional Convention of 1898, which was basically one of many conventions and meetings of its kind across the South, where some of the architects of Jim Crow were drawing up blueprints for a system of exclusion that would disenfranchise as many Black voters as possible.
That system of exclusion, violence, and intimidation included poll taxes and literacy tests, various forms of criminalization and other tactics that were of course, accompanied by acts of lynching and other heinous forms of violence. And the success of those measures was overwhelming. In 1888, there were 127,923 Black voters and 126,884 white voters in the state of Louisiana. By 1904, there were 1,342 registered Black voters remaining in the state. In Alabama in 1900, there were 180,000 registered Black voters, but only 3000 by 1903. And in Mississippi in 1955, 10 years before the passage of the Voting Rights Act, only 4.3% of Black people were registered to vote. So we are talking about an incredibly successful political project designed by white men, who much like their contemporary counterparts, recognized that their situation was changing and that they could not maintain white dominance of the political system through free and fair elections.
In 1965, the Voting Rights Act passed and within the first year of its passage, we saw 250,000 Black people registered to vote. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Black voter turnout has increased incrementally in every presidential election since 1996. In 2012, Black voters showed up at higher rates than white voters. Then in 2013, the Supreme court gutted the Voting Rights Act and immediately we saw a deluge of voter ID laws, poll closures, gerrymandering, and other attacks on the Black vote, including various forms of intimidation. On this show, we have covered a number of the attacks on voting rights that we saw under the Trump administration, including efforts to sabotage the postal system to derail mail-in voting. And we did some episodes on what you all were up against in Georgia specifically.
I know you all had a very sophisticated voter suppression apparatus working against you as you were registering people to vote and working turnout, but as everyone knows, you made history and defeated that apparatus. But now we’re seeing the backlash and the hastening momentum of what some are calling Jim Crow 2.0. Can you tell us about the passage of SB 202 and how it amplifies what you all were already up against in Georgia?
TW: Yeah, so Senate Bill 202 is a direct attack, excuse me, in consequence of our success in electing progressive representation in Georgia. So it’s really, really clear to us that voter suppressionists are working to punish Black and brown voters, we’re not voting them into office. Senate Bill 202 is full of things that historically Republicans have enjoyed: Saturday and Sunday voting, early voting. These are things that they created legislation for and passed into law under their majorities. So now that the population of Georgia is shifting, which I will reference a little bit later when I talk about our name, The New Georgia Project, but now that we’re shifting into a majority that is comprised of Black, brown, queer, young people, they want to change the rules because we have figured out how to win the game that they have tried to stack against us.
So what we see is them trying to eliminate Sunday voting in Georgia, and in the South, a lot of Black churches have something that’s called Souls to the Polls. That’s where churches, that often serve as voting precincts as well, will allow their church members or encourage their church members to vote on a particular Sunday. They take care of events, excuse me. They take care of events on that Sunday together, they have celebrations, they all vote, they do different things, but it’s a large organization that has typically and historically turned out significant numbers of Black people. So forcing counties to choose now between Saturday and Sunday voting is a direct attack. Many people have tried to say that there aren’t a lot of voters that are impacted by the elimination of Sunday voting, but when we look at the numbers, we know that 37% of Black voters voted on Sunday. So additionally, when we look at the criminality of giving people things that just meet their basic human rights needs and necessities, while they’re standing in line, in the rain, or an off year in Georgia, maybe even the snow, but usually, like, sweltering heat during a primary, right? So we’re trying to give people water so that they are well, not because we want someone or we want them to vote for a particular person, but we are making that a crime.
So to make that a crime is so incredibly egregious because especially many of the things that are included in SB 202 that will definitely increase the likelihood of the long lines, we’re certainly working against each other, right? So we’re eliminating two weeks of early voting, we’re forcing people to choose between Saturday and Sunday, we’re minimizing ballot boxes, reducing early voting locations, and all of these things. And Republican voter suppressionists have the nerve to say that this is actually expanding access to voting. There is no logic to that. So, like I said, it’s a very clear attack and it tends to punish Black and brown voters, especially Black voters in Georgia for voting for people that they actually want to represent them.
KH: The provision about preventing people from offering food or water to people in the line has gotten a lot of attention. It’s always disturbing anytime the government tries to make basic acts of human decency illegal. It should never be illegal to give someone food or water. But in this case, this criminalization of solidarity and regard for our fellow human beings is clearly about trying to make an already difficult situation feel even more arduous or even hopeless in order to suppress votes. The idea that people should have to go hungry or thirsty for hours into hours to vote is just so impressively hostile.
TW: Yeah, it’s really offensive and even before these things passed, I remember myself being in Bibb County, in Macon Georgia during the primary elections during the summer, when we were still seeing those really, really, really long lines. And, of course that’s also what we now know was the beginning of COVID here in Georgia. So I personally had an experience where an officer blocked my car and they said there was a report of someone that I happened to fit the description of, that was hollering and threatening someone in the parking lot.
There was no such instance occurring in the parking lot. I know that because I was standing in the parking lot. They’re harassing us for talking to voters. Important to note when I say us, I actually mean my organization, not even me. We’re standing 300 feet away, way more than the required 150. So understanding that people will now try and use the law as a tool of intimidation that they were already utilizing before it was even illegal to do those things, is very terrifying, right? We can only imagine what they’re going to try and do when we approach into this upcoming November election, if House [Resolution] 1 and House [Resolution] 4 aren’t passed, or there’s no judicial injunction to stop the implementation of SB 202.
KH: So I know that now that 202 has passed, you all have been organizing fiercely for the passage of Federal Voting Rights Legislation HR 1 For The People Act, which would expand early in mail-in voting and implement automatic voter registration among other provisions that terrify Republicans. That legislation would not, sadly, re-enfranchise 5 million people, including one in six Black people, who are currently denied the right to vote due to criminal laws. But amid this five alarm fire that we’re experiencing passing this bill or one like it does seem essential. I personally hate electoral politics and I know some of my listeners feel the same but I am passionate about people having access to the ballot because while I do think the system must ultimately come undone, I am not in favor of surrendering our fate to the Republican party and Jim Crow 2.0. So can you tell us a bit about what the struggle looks like right now, both in terms of the fight for federal legislation and taking on corporations?
TW: Yeah. So this fight right now is really multifaceted in some of the ways that you’ve just mentioned, but even just some bifurcation, or additional levels, even on both sides of corporate and federal. So we are lucky to be in a state like Georgia that does have representation in our Senate, that supports House [Resolution] 1 and House [Resolution] 4. However, we are home to several corporations that fund opposition or people that oppose, excuse me, House [Resolution] 1 and House [Resolution] 4. We have done work to encourage senators from other states, using text banks to reach out to constituents in those states, like Arizona or Texas, to make sure that they’re putting the pressure on their federal legislators as well, but also utilizing our collective power in organizing against the corporations. So speaking out against them, having those same texts and phone banks, or in-person protests against these corporations, because the people that they are supporting the vote to be suppressed, those are their clients and those are their employees.
So there are definitely elected officials that help them, that perhaps create loopholes that are beneficial for their line of business, whatever that may be, but there is no business, there is none of that line of business if they don’t have clients and they don’t have employees that support them. So of course we are not necessarily in a stage where we’re calling for a boycott, we recognize the potential power to do that, but we understand that again, the people that we would be asking folks to boycott, the folks that would be impacted are the same people whose vote we’re trying to protect, so it’s a really interesting dance to dance I think, in trying to be respectful and protective of your community, while trying to force the hand of people that can make the decisions.
Because if we allow for House [Resolution] 1 and House [Resolution] 4 to die, or to not pass before we see local elections in a state like Georgia, the damage will be in some ways irreversible. We can always win again later, but we can’t afford to lose the momentum that we’ve started building now, especially when we get ready to have conversations about things like gerrymandering. We’re looking not very much forward to a lot of cracking and packing, that’s probably going to come from the same Republican party that created SB 202, right? So we have a lot of work to do, and we have to put the pressure on everyone before it’s too late.
KH: Can you explain what you mean by cracking and packing?
TW: Definitely. So cracking and packing is a term some people maybe say, packing and cracking. But those terms are talking district lines and the lines that legislators will draw when we look at our house districts, whatever districts, right, that you vote in, but specifically in the state of Georgia right now looking at the state house and state Senate districts. So what we will often see is whatever party is in power, I’m not going to say that this is something only Republicans do, but when we see parties in power, they will try and consolidate votes of people that do not likely want to vote for them, so that they can increase the political power of those that do, by expanding their territory, like the geographical territory, so that they have more physical representation.
So you can take a few city blocks that have 100,000 people, and put them all together and give them one legislator. And then you can take a part of the state that maybe looks a little bit more like you, and you disperse them a little bit differently so that they have maybe five representatives for that same 100,000 people. So now those people, that happen to look like the people who drew the district lines, have five times the electoral power of the people who didn’t. I hope that was a decent on the fly description.
KH: Yes, that was. Thank you. So I talked a bit at the top of the show about those constitutional conventions that helped usher in Jim Crow. Most people have never learned about those histories with any specificity. Just as most people don’t know who is doing that kind of design work today. But much of that work is a matter of public record, and while Republican officials we are up against today, don’t say out loud that they are trying to eliminate Black votes, they will state plainly that they want fewer voters. And we know that these maneuvers have followed increases in Black voter turnout, over a period of years, that led to Black voter turnout surpassing white voter turnout in the 2012 presidential election. In March, an attorney representing the Arizona Republican Party told the Supreme Court that striking down voting restrictions would put “us at a competitive disadvantage relative to the Democrats.” They don’t say words like Black or Native, they just talk about volume but it’s clear who’s being targeted. History doesn’t repeat itself but it’s full of reformulations. And in my mind, members of ALEC and the officials crafting today’s voting restrictions are clearly the historical counterparts of the architects of Jim Crow.
TW: I totally agree with that. This is why it’s so important to understand what these tactics look like and when you see it, you can call it by name and you can fight it, and that’s exactly what we intend to do. And we have been calling these people out. We work really hard to force people to be honest about the fact that they don’t want us to vote. Many times they don’t mind suppressing our vote even at the expense of their own voters.
We understand that our vote is our access to democracy and it’s our seat at the table so how dare someone suggest that we should not be a part of that? Let alone people that just happen to not like [our] politics. When in reality, if they really, really wanted to win, they could just run better candidates. They can run [on] policies that are not oppressive and suppressive. I read a headline recently that said that a Republican lawmaker stated they did not want ignorant people voting; that’s very terribly coded language. We know exactly what you’re saying, to your earlier point, of people making statements and it being implied that those are Democratic Voters, Black voters, Native voters — the reality is we are all of those things and ignorant is not one of them. We know exactly what we’re voting for, which is why we’re not interested in voting against our best interests. By the year 2024 Georgia’s majority will be made up of Black, Brown, queer, young people. It will no longer be a majority of white men, and that’s what people are terrified of.
They are afraid of us reclaiming that power, which is why we see the attacks on voting. That would be impactful even in our local elections, as soon as November, as well as the impending attack that we see from the Republicans, when they will go into the redistricting lines that I just mentioned. So these are all of the reasons that we have to go really, really, really hard and work extremely, extremely tirelessly almost, it feels, right, to get HR 1 and HR [4] passed on the federal levels because they protect States like Georgia. Unfortunately, Georgia is not alone, Texas is right on the cusp, hopefully not, of experiencing exactly what we’re experiencing in Georgia. Some things that may be even worse. All of these things I’ve said are exactly why we can’t afford to let people hold onto power by malicious and egregious tactics of cheating.
KH: Absolutely. I was just talking to folks in Arizona about what’s happening there. And the Native vote is very obviously being targeted because the Native vote played a clearly crucial role in the last election. And so now they’re coming up with these signature rules and these various bills they’re trying to pass that would make it harder for Native people to vote by mail.
Another thing I find concerning is how dismissive many people have been of anti-protest laws that Republicans have been proposing and enacting at the state level. I had someone tell me the other day, “That’s all chest puffing, they’ll never pass any of those and if they do, they’ll all be struck down.” When we have already seen the passage of some of those laws and I don’t know what Supreme Court those folks are thinking about, but I would not count on this one to halt any attacks on protestors.
According to the New York Times, GOP lawmakers in 34 States have introduced 81 anti-protest bills during the 2021 legislative session, more than twice as many proposals, as in any other year. Under Jim Crow, the Black vote was subverted by the letter of the law and vigilante violence and I think we should expect the same here. I think a lot of people think we escaped all of that when we removed Trump, but white supremacist authoritarianism is still very much a threat. We are witnessing efforts to explicitly legalize vehicular attacks on protesters. After what happened in Charlottesville, and the way the right-wing has echoed that tactic in memes, in calls to action, and with actual vehicular assaults, I see these laws as a not-so-coded call to action. White vigilantes are being called upon to play their role in the subversion of Black votes and the suppression of movements, just as they have in years past. Even in places where these laws don’t pass, legislators are sending a message of support and solidarity to anyone who might be contemplating these attacks, and sending a not-so-coded message that tells them, you are part of our vision.
And really, if Trump hadn’t convinced his people that they had the last election in the bag, I think we might’ve seen a lot more scary behavior or even militant action at polling places that could have had a chilling impact on the election. I don’t even like saying that out loud, but I feel like there’s a national state of denial around this, that needs to be interrupted because what looks like failure or even folly is sometimes rehearsal and people who feel cheated or unheard tend to escalate over time. So as someone who has been on the front lines of these efforts of mass disenfranchisement and Republican efforts to steal the election, can you say a bit about the stakes for protesters?
TW: Yeah. I mean, we are under significant attack as protestors. We’re under significant attack both from counter protesters, just oppositional people, but also from our government. They are making laws that make it a felony to obstruct the street while protesting. That is our right, they’re working actively against us. Even here, in the city of Atlanta that’s run by a Black woman named Keisha, we saw the escalation of military tanks when people were protesting over the murder of Rayshard Brooks, completely unnecessary. They were meeting water bottles and people who were screaming, who were in mourning with military tanks. So we know that even our local governments that we think are going to support us, are not likely to. We know that our government, our State government is passing laws to make our protest felonious when it’s one of our most inherent rights as a person, but also as a citizen. So we know that protesters are under attack from local governments, we know that they’re under attack from state governments that are passing laws to criminalize our inherent right to protest. And lastly, obviously we have the issue of counter protestors who show up to voting precincts, who show up to protest, who even show up to the Capitol to protest. However, they show up in arms when they do, they’re protesting, they still present differently than we do. However, we are the people that are identified as threats, so it’s really scary. We go through trainings to try and protect ourselves from counter protesters, from law enforcement but the reality is, when you’re out there, you are always taking a risk.
When we do major protests, we do things like write the name of our attorney’s phone number or our safety contact on our arms. We don’t wear contacts, we wear our glasses. Sometimes when we go to poll monitor or even to vote, now, those are the same things that we have started to do and recommend for other people to do, so I think that, unfortunately, we really, really have to take the threat of fighting the establishment on issues that pertain to voting, but also while we are exercising our right to vote, we have to take those threats really seriously.
KH: Absolutely, and listening to you talk about what it’s like in Atlanta really resonates. Because here in Chicago we have a Black woman mayor, Lori Lightfoot, and people made a very big deal about the fact that a gay Black woman was elevated to that office, but we have now seen a level of repression under this mayor that, in my experience, surpasses anything we saw under Rahm Emanuel. And we all know that protesters were viciously brutalized under Emanuel in this city, but this last year has been uglier than anything I have witnessed prior. And there’s also a national angle to that, which is why people in blue states should not feel safe and secure, and consider these anti-protest laws to be some kind of red state problem. Because when norms erode and shift around the treatment of protesters, Democratic neoliberal mayors take advantage of that as well. Sometimes, those actions are coordinated among big city mayors, as we saw with Occupy. So I hope people understand that what we tolerate, in terms of what’s inflicted on others, will not remain at a distance. In various ways, it will come back to us. Because the agenda of maintaining order under late capitalism exists in every city and state, and these mayors will take advantage of any shifting norms that they can.
But circling back to voter suppression and what we can do about it, a lot of people will agree that it’s important, but really don’t have any idea what to do about it, especially if they live in a blue state. So what should people do, and maybe not do, to help support this fight?
TW: I think that’s a great question because I think there’s a really large amount of people who just sometimes feel paralyzed by how much trauma they have to fight every day and how many enemies we see as suppressionists as an oppressionist. I think that the first thing I recommend for people to do is find their political home in their community or in their state. If you’re in Georgia obviously we invite you to be a part of the New Georgia Project or The New Georgia Project Action Fund. But there are things that everyone can do, right?
You can talk to your local communities about the elections that are happening, even giving rides to your neighbors to polling locations is an option. We know in the State of Georgia, having copies of your ID is going to be a serious challenge for people. Helping people access their copies, which by the way creates a poll tax, but that’s a whole different discussion, but helping people access some of those things if you have the means, right? Maybe they’re bedridden, or home bound, and just physically don’t have the access to obtain or financially don’t have the access to obtain.
There are small things that we can do just as individual people. I can’t believe I didn’t say this first, but also, register to vote. That’s a really, really important part of all of this, right? Our collective power is super important and a lot of us are frustrated and we don’t have a lot of faith in the voting system and in our elections.
And that lack of trust is very well-deserved. However, it only can maybe get better if we all continue to engage in it. And lastly, I really think that more people should consider actually running for some of the offices. If you have qualifications for some office in your local community, or even your larger statewide county, whatever community, please consider doing that, we don’t have enough good representation that’s why we are in some of the situations that we are in, and we deserve much better from all people, regardless of the party that they’re in. So I definitely want to start making sure to encourage more people to consider running for office as well.
KH: Well, thank you for that. And how can people connect with your group specifically?
TW: We have a few different ways that you can connect with us. Obviously, our website is newgeorgiaproject.org or for the Action Fund, ngpaf.org. We also have our Instagram pages, New Georgia Project, it’s very easy to find. And also I’m happy to allow people to connect with me, so my email address is Toni toni@newgeorgiaproject.org. As we are moving into November, I think a lot of people that are listening probably have elections coming up, so start thinking about those voting plans. We have toolkits that we are happy to share with folks on how to create voting plans, and unfortunately those are things that people need to start thinking about now so check us out on our website and definitely on our social media, Instagram and Facebook are both New Georgia Project as well as Twitter.
KH: And we will indeed include in all of that information, as well as some other information about how you can get involved with the fight against voter suppression, in the show notes on our website. Well, Toni, I want to thank you so much for joining us today and for all of the important work that you’re doing.
TW: Not a problem. Thank you so much for having me, I really enjoyed it here.
KH: I also want to thank our listeners for joining us today, and remember our best defense against cynicism is to do good and to remember that the good we do matters. Until next time, I’ll see you in the streets.
Show Notes:
Organizations to check out:
You can learn more about Toni’s group, The New Georgia Project, by checking out their website, or by following the group on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.
The Frontline is a coalition of people and groups that aim “to defeat white nationalism, protect our democracy, and demand that those in power advance a people’s agenda. They hosted the teach-in Voting Rights Under Attack! that was mentioned at the top of the show.
If you want to support Native voting rights, Four Directions is a Native organization that aims to “protect our communities and our rights by going to the polls to vote.” They are currently taking action against Native voter suppression in Arizona.
Further reading:
House Rejects Cori Bush’s Amendment on Voting Rights for Incarcerated People by Mike Ludwig
Arizona Is on the Verge of Adopting Voter Suppression Laws by Marian K. Schneider
Georgia’s New Voting Law Is Rife With Hidden Horrors by Greg Palast
13 States Set to Copy Georgia Law Restricting Independence of Election Officials by Sharon Zhang
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Republican lawmakers nationwide have introduced a record number of bills this year to limit access to the ballot and give the GOP an advantage in future elections — 361 voter suppression bills in all, according to data from the Brennan Center for Justice. Many of these bills have been introduced in Southern states including Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia. The proposals would among other things implement stricter voter ID requirements, limit absentee voting, make voter registration more difficult, and allow aggressive voter roll purges.
Some of these measures have already become law. In Georgia, for example, Gov. Brian Kemp (R) last month signed into law a bill that erects new barriers to voting, including a photo ID requirement to vote absentee by mail, a narrower window of time for people to request an absentee ballot, and limits on the number of ballot drop-off boxes. The Georgia law even goes so far as to make it illegal for advocacy groups to give water or food to people waiting in long lines to vote.
But at the same time, Democratic state lawmakers are working to expand democracy through legislation. Lawmakers in 47 states have introduced, prefiled, or carried over 843 bills to expand voting access, including in the same 10 Southern states where restrictive voting bills were introduced.
“More than a third of the expansive bills address absentee voting, while more than a fifth seek to ease voter registration,” according to a Brennan Center analysis. “State lawmakers are also focusing on expanding access to early voting and restoring voting rights to people with past convictions.”
Some of the pro-democracy proposals are coming out of states with a long history of voter suppression. In deep red Mississippi, for example, Democratic lawmakers have introduced 12 bills to expand or restore voting rights. In Texas, also under GOP control, they’ve introduced 67.
And in Virginia, the Democratic-controlled legislature recently passed House Bill 1890, the Voting Rights Act of Virginia. The measure is modeled on the groundbreaking federal Voting Rights Act of 1965, which required Justice Department preclearance of voting changes in states with a history of voter discrimination until the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the law in its 2013 Shelby County v. Holder ruling.
“Passing the Voting Rights Act of Virginia — being the first state in the South, the first state that was covered under Section 5 of preclearance to do it — signals to the country that here’s a state that has this dark history. And we are trying to get beyond that,” Tram Nguyen, co-executive director of the progressive New Virginia Majority, told The New York Times.
The new law requires local elections administrators to receive approval from the state attorney general for changes like moving voting precincts or elections registrars’ offices, and it allows voters and the attorney general to sue over claims of voter suppression. It also explicitly prohibits any racial discrimination or intimidation related to voting.
“Voting is fundamental to our democracy,” said Gov. Ralph Northam (D), “and this legislation is a model for how states can ensure the integrity of elections and protect the sacred right to vote.”
Since Democrats won control of its legislature in 2019, Virginia has gone from one of the hardest states for voting to one of the easiest, according to a ranking by researchers at Northern Illinois University.
Next door in Kentucky, the Republican-controlled legislature passed a bipartisan measure that mandates three days of no-excuse early voting, ballot drop boxes in every county, and an online portal to register for absentee voting, among other changes aimed at expanding voting. Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear signed it into law earlier this month.
“When much of the country has put in more restrictive laws, Kentucky legislators, Kentucky leaders were able to come together to stand up for democracy and to expand the opportunity for people to vote,” Beshear said at the signing ceremony. Republican lawmakers endorsed the new law, bucking the trend of GOP-led legislatures working to undermine voting access. Jennifer Decker, a first-term Republican legislator who sponsored the new law, has said that changes made to Kentucky’s elections in response to the COVID-19 pandemic helped build bipartisan support for her proposal.
And in North Carolina, a state that has been at the center of struggles over voting rights in recent years, Democratic lawmakers in the Republican-controlled General Assembly have introduced a sweeping package of election reform proposals titled the Fix Our Democracy Act to expand and protect voting rights for all, end partisan and racial gerrymandering, reduce the influence of big money in politics, increase transparency and accountability in state government, and ensure fair and impartial courts. It was inspired by the far-reaching H.R. 1 federal election reform proposal titled the “For the People Act,” which has passed the Democratic-controlled House and now awaits action in the evenly divided Senate. The North Carolina measure has been referred to the Committee on Rules and Operations of the Senate.
“It’s about time we make the promise of democracy real for all North Carolinians and restore trust in our elections,” wrote Melissa Price Kromm, director of North Carolina Voters for Clean Elections Coalition, in an op-ed for The News & Observer of Raleigh. “North Carolinians won’t always see eye-to-eye on politics, but we can all agree that it should be us choosing our government, not anonymous donors or powerful corporate interests.”
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
On March 25, the Georgia state legislature passed a now-infamous Republican-backed bill that introduced a series of stringent voter restrictions under the auspices of “election integrity.” The bill (SB 202), which Democrats across the board have described as a grievous violation of voting rights, limits the number of drop boxes, reduces the time allowed to request a ballot, bars election officials from sending out mass absentee ballot applications, and criminalizes the practice of handing out food or water to voters waiting in line, as PolitiFact reported this week.
Democrats raged against both the state’s legislature, as well as against Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican apparently trying to rebuild his reputation in his own party after resisting former President Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election results while the bill was in transit. But just as much ire was directed at corporate America, which appeared to stand on the sidelines as Peach State lawmakers propelled the bill forward. Among those most criticized were big Georgia-based companies like Coca-Cola, Delta Airlines, AT&T and Home Depot.
Facing enormous pressure to take a stand against the bill, two of these institutions (Coke and Delta) have recently spoken out against SB 202, while another of them spoke about the importance of voting rights more broadly. Reports show that over the past several years, however, every single one of those spoke very differently with their political donations.
According to CNBC’s Brian Schwartz, since 2018 Coca-Cola has contributed more than $25,000 to Kemp, as well as to the bill’s state Senate backers. Salon found in company filings, for instance, that thousands of dollars in 2020 were donated via Coke’s Georgia PAC to state Sens. Michael Dugan, Frank Ginn, Chuck Hufstetler, John Kennedy, Jeff Mullis and Blake Tillery, along with state Rep. Barry Fleming, all of whom sponsored the widely-criticized bill to clamp down on voting access.
Coke also made a corporate donation of $172,000 to the Georgia Political Action Fund. According to Georgia state campaign reports, the “The Coca-Cola Company Georgia Political Action [sic] Fund” — almost certainly the same entity — gave $4,000 last year to Kemp’s 2024 primary campaign. It also gave thousands to the aforementioned Hufstetler and Mullis, along with Sens. Dean Burke and Butch Miller.
Asked to comment on its relationships with these lawmakers, a Coca-Cola representative directed Salon to CEO James Quincey’s official statement on the bill, which states that “throughout Georgia’s legislative session, [Coke] provided feedback to members of both legislative chambers and political parties, opposing measures in the bills that would diminish or deter access to voting.” So while the company claims it worked behind the legislative scenes to remove the most objectionable provisions of SB 202, Coke concurrently bankrolled sponsors who were probably responsible for those very provisions.
Asked whether the bill’s passage will inform the company’s future political giving, a Coca-Cola spokesperson emphasized that it had “suspended all political contributions in January after the incident at the U.S. Capitol.”
That “pause” is still in place, the spokesperson added, declining to provide a timeline for the potential resumption of political donations.
Delta Airlines, another Georgia-based company that has spoken out against the bill, has a similarly deep history of backing the bill’s most ardent supporters. According to CNBC, Delta has given more than $25,000 to Kemp and the bill’s sponsors. Slate estimated that this number may in fact be north of $41,600.
According to Georgia state filings reviewed by Salon, in 2020, Delta gave thousands to Dugan, Miller and Mullis through its corporate PAC. It also donated $15,000 to the Georgia House Republican Trust, a fund run by the Georgia House Republican Caucus, which has routinely counterattacked Democratic criticism of SB 202. As one of its Facebook posts claimed on Tuesday: “The attack on Georgia’s SB 202 Election Law and the Senate Filibuster are just ways for the Liberals to use the rhetoric of ‘racist’ and ‘Jim Crow’ to justify the federal election takeover of HR 1 to pass through Congress.” Delta also gave $15,000 to the Georgia Republican Senatorial Committee, which, according to its annual registration from 2015, is run by state Sens. Steve Gooch and John Wilkinson, both of whom voted yes on the voting-restriction bill.
Salon was referred by a Delta spokesperson to CEO Ed Bastian’s March 31 statement expressing his dissatisfaction with the final legislative product. “Delta joined other major Atlanta corporations to work closely with elected officials from both parties, to try and remove some of the most egregious measures from the bill,” he said. “We had some success in eliminating the most suppressive tactics that some had proposed. However, I need to make it crystal clear that the final bill is unacceptable and does not match Delta’s values.”
But according to a tip from a purported Delta insider to MeidasTouch’s Ben Meiselas, the airline previously praised SB 202 and released an internal statement on March 26 saying that Delta’s “voice was well represented and well heard.” A quote from Bastian in the memo explained that the legislation had “considerably improved” because of Delta’s intervention. Kemp said later that Bastian’s follow-up statement on March 31 stood “in stark contrast to our conversations with the company.” He said, “At no point did Delta share any opposition to expanding early voting, strengthening voter ID measures, increasing the use of secure drop boxes statewide, and making it easier for local election officials to administer elections — which is exactly what this bill does.”
Bruce Freed, president of the Center for Political Accountability, told Salon that companies like Coca-Cola and Delta are reckoning with a “new world” of public scrutiny when it comes to political spending. “The murder of George Floyd; the insurrectionary attack on the Capitol; the refusal of 147 senators and House members to accept the outcome of the presidential election: All of these things have made political spending a major hot button issue that people react to viscerally,” he said. Major companies like these with powerful competitors, he noted, are growing increasingly wary over their political spending, since it has the potential to sway loyal customers.
AT&T, another Georgia-based company in fierce competition for cell-phone users with Verizon, T-Mobile and Sprint, also issued a statement following SB 202’s passage, this one released April 1 and attributed to CEO John Stankey:
We believe the right to vote is sacred and we support voting laws that make it easier for more Americans to vote in free, fair and secure elections. We understand that election laws are complicated, not our company’s expertise and ultimately the responsibility of elected officials. But, as a company, we have a responsibility to engage. For this reason, we are working together with other businesses through groups like the Business Roundtable to support efforts to enhance every person’s ability to vote. In this way, the right knowledge and expertise can be applied to make a difference on this fundamental and critical issue.
It’s fair to say that statement does not make clear where AT&T actually stands on SB 202. Although the company noted that elections should be “free, fair, and secure,” those qualities were never clearly defined relative to Georgia’s election laws, either now or previously.
As with Coca-Cola and Delta, AT&T’s press statement may be meant to distract public attention from less overt ways the company has spoken with its wallet. According to a report recently published by progressive think tank Public Citizen, from 2015 to 2020 AT&T poured $259,950 into 26 voter suppression bills proposed by the Georgia state legislature, including SB 202. The company has donated generously to SB 202 sponsors Mullis ($15,900) and Miller ($13,600) as well as various legislators who supported the bill’s ratification, such as Sens. Stephen Gooch ($10,900) and William Cowsert ($14,200) and Rep. Jan Jones ($14,200). A CNBC report found that the company has also donated to Kemp’s campaign.
More recently, AT&T’s disclosures show that through its Georgia PAC and direct donations, the company gave thousands in 2020 to at least three SB 202 sponsors, as well as giving $15,000 to the Georgia Republican Party, $30,000 to the Georgia House Republican Trust and $18,500 to Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan ($18,500), who is said to have “paved the way for SB 202,” according to Fair Fight Action, a nonprofit voting rights advocacy group founded by Stacey Abrams.
AT&T did not respond to Salon’s request for comment.
Home Depot, another Georgia-based company, has spent tens of thousands of dollars to support Kemp, along with many of the aforementioned lawmakers. A spokesperson for the company told Salon that it “believe[s] that all elections should be accessible, fair and secure and support broad voter participation. We’ll continue to work to ensure our associates, both in Georgia and across the country, have the information and resources to vote.”
Home Depot declined to acknowledge its relationship with any Georgia GOP lawmakers who supported the bill, however, and declined to comment on whether the passage of SB 202 will affect the company’s future political spending, instead saying that its donations do not reflect a partisan bias. “Our associate-funded PAC supports candidates on both sides of the aisle who champion pro-business, pro-retail positions that create jobs and economic growth,” a company spokesperson claimed. “As always, it will evaluate future donations against a number of factors.”
Other firms that donated to supporters and sponsors of the bill include UnitedHealth Group, Southern Gas Company, Comcast, Walmart, General Motors and Pfizer.
Daniel Weiner, deputy director of the Brennan Center for Justice told Salon that corporations must be held responsible for every political donation they make, even when they give to both parties. “Making a political contribution is a public political act,” said Weiner. “When you do that, you’re saying broadly that you want the recipient in office. You can’t really then turn around when they do something you don’t like, and say, ‘We have no responsibility for that whatsoever.’”
There is no evidence that any of the corporations discussed here directly advocated for SB 202’s passage. But “if [companies] want to spend money on politics,” Weiner explained, “they have to accept that they’re going to be judged on the outcomes they make possible — not their intent.”
Various reports have suggested recently that the heightened scrutiny directed to corporate donations may lead more firms to dark money channels, which can render anonymous effectively unlimited amounts of money spent on politics. While most dark money spending is dedicated to federal candidates and campaigns, there is nothing stopping corporations from employing it at the state level.
In late March, for instance, it was reported that an Atlanta-based dark money group called Proclivity paid $550,000 to committees that bolstered the campaigns of several sham candidates in three Florida Senate races. As Politico reported, these candidates appeared to be on the ballot entirely to siphon off votes from Democrats.
In West Virginia, dark money groups contributed millions of dollars to the state’s Supreme Court of Appeals races in 2020. A report by Sludge found that a sizable chunk of these contributions originally stemmed from corporate donations by companies like Marathon Petroleum and Koch Industries looking to prop up Republican candidates.
Dark money also abounds in Oklahoma. According to KGOU, between Aug. 25 and Nov. 3 of 2020, about $961,400 was spent by dark money groups on 101 seats in the Oklahoma House of Representatives and 24 seats in the state Senate. Much of this money was spent by Oklahoma MAGA, a dark money group that pumped $292,950 into pro-GOP and anti-Democratic campaigns in two Tulsa-area races. Dark money groups like the Advance Oklahoma PAC, Advance Oklahoma Fund, Americans United For Values and A Public Voice also spent thousands of dollars in the Sooner State.
The influence of dark money on state races is not purely anecdotal; the data supports it as well. According to a 2016 report by the Brennan Center analyzing Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Maine, and Massachusetts, “On average, only 29 percent of outside spending was fully transparent in 2014 in the states we examined, sharply down from 76 percent in 2006.”
While dark money in state races abounds, the traditional PAC model of political spending still reigns supreme in the world of corporate campaign finance and this this was especially true in the case of the Georgia legislature.
Corporate America’s role in shaping Georgia’s legislature goes far beyond the relatively visible question of direct donations to candidates. For instance, according to a report given to Salon by the CPA, in 2020 46 major corporations donated nearly $17 million to the Republican State Leadership Committee, which works to elect GOP candidates to state offices throughout the nation. The RSLC directed $144,700 of that funding — through its PAC and the Georgia House Republican Trust — to 47 GOP Georgia state legislators elected in 2020. One of them sponsored SB 202, and effectively all of them voted for it.
The CPA also detailed that many large corporations donated in support of voting-restriction bills that preceded SB 202 and likely paved the way for its passage. For instance, $26,050 worth of corporate donations were raised in 2020 for state Sen. Larry Walker, who introduced SB 67, which would have made it harder for voters to access absentee ballots, according the Brennan Center. Another $17,800 of corporate cash was raised for state Rep. Barry Fleming, who introduced HB 270, a bill molded in the same spirit.
Exactly how much the national furor surrounding the passage of SB 202 will prompt corporate America to distance itself from the Republican Party in Georgia and elsewhere remains to be seen. This week, 100 corporate executives reportedly convened to discuss halting donations to lawmakers who support any anti-voting measures. Many GOP lawmakers, however, have rebuked corporations for taking sides on the issue. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., urged them to “stay out of politics.” Whether “politics” includes campaign donations to lawmakers like McConnell — who has long relied on corporate support — has the potential to radically change the future of campaign finance.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Despite all of the voter suppression efforts, threats of voter intimidation and a raging pandemic, the people of the United States participated in record numbers in last November’s election. And they voted Trump out. Continue reading
The post Voting Rights Under Threat appeared first on BillMoyers.com.
This post was originally published on BillMoyers.com.
Biden’s address was in part a victory lap after he signed the American Rescue Plan, a sweeping measure that launches the country in the direction it has avoided since 1981, using the national government not to cut taxes, which favors those with wealth, but rather to support working families and children. Continue reading
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This post was originally published on BillMoyers.com.
Rep. John Sarbanes (D-Maryland) announced on Monday that all House Democrats have now co-sponsored the 2021 version of the For the People Act, or H.R. 1. House Democrats have said that they will hold a vote on the legislation during the first week of March.
H.R. 1 is a sweeping election reform act that is a bundle of election- and voting-related laws, and it’s been favored by Democrats and progressives for several years now. The law targets corporate campaign finance by exposing “dark money” campaign contributions and ending the Citizens United ruling that unleashed massive amounts of corporate spending in politics.
It also greatly expands voting access by automatically registering eligible voters; making Election Day a holiday for federal employees and encouraging the private sector to do the same; and curbing partisan gerrymandering — which gives Republicans who are in control of a majority of state legislatures an advantage — and voter roll purging. In other words, as many journalists and political experts have said, it could save democracy.
Democrats passed the bill in the House in 2019, but then-Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refused to bring it to a vote in the Senate. Republicans — and many organizations that support them in their campaigns — are opposed to the bill.
“Our democracy is in a state of deep disrepair,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California), House Administration Chair Zoe Lofgren (D-California) and Democracy Reform Task Force Chair Sarbanes in a statement when they reintroduced H.R. 1 in January. “Across the country, people of all political persuasions — including Democrats, Independents and Republicans — are profoundly frustrated with the chaos, corruption and inaction that plague much of our politics.”
The lawmakers also point out in their statement that 2020 was a particularly fraught year for elections. Former President Donald Trump and the Republican Party fought hard to undermine and question the election and its results. Those unprecedented attacks on the election have now led to a huge wave of bills introduced in states by Republicans seeking to restrict voting rights.
The Brennan Center for Justice has found that, as of this month, over 165 bills that seek to limit voting have been filed in states, as compared to only 35 at this time last year. They are particularly aimed at limiting mail-in voting, imposing stricter voter ID requirements, restricting voter registration and expanding voter roll purging.
Efforts to limit voting have been particularly egregious in Georgia which turned blue in the most recent election and where Black voters, in particular, were instrumental in clinching the Democrats’ victory. Last month, a Republican lawmaker there attempted to pass a bill that would require voters to send in two copies of their ID when requesting an absentee ballot.
On Friday, Georgia Republicans filed legislation that proposes sweeping changes to election laws as well as further restrictions to absentee and early voting. It would impose more restrictions on voter IDs when requesting an absentee ballot and limit the window for voters to request and counties to send out the ballots. It also prohibits counties from conducting early voting on Sundays, which NPR reports is traditionally a day with more turnout from Black voters through “souls to the polls” events.
The Nation said that this drive from Republicans to limit voting is voter suppression that is, in many cases, specifically aimed at Black voters. “At the beating heart of the Big Lie — the deranged fantasy that the 2020 election was stolen from its loser, Donald Trump — is the Republican belief that the votes of Black people shouldn’t count,” wrote The Nation’s Elie Mystal. “The new laws cover everything Republicans could think of to make it harder for people to cast a vote.”
Republicans seem to be specifically targeting mail-in voting and early voting after many states opened both massively to avoid crowds and gathering on election day because of COVID-19. These bills follow the many attempts by Republicans to quash voting before the election last year where they tried every which way to limit who could vote, as well as when and where they could vote.
Polling shows, however, that the expanded voting access in the 2020 election due to COVID was quite popular among voters from both parties. Seventy percent of voters support the adoption of no-excuse absentee voting that many states allowed last year and two-thirds support expanding early voting periods before the election, according to a new poll by Strategies 360 and Voting Rights Lab.
H.R. 1 also enjoys wide support among the public; according to polling from Data for Progress and Equal Citizens, 67 percent of Americans support the legislation, including 77 percent of Democrats and 56 percent of Republicans.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Donald Trump may be spending his post-presidency golfing at Mar-a -Lago but he remains front and center in the hearts and minds of millions of Republican voters, as evidenced by the 46% who said in a new Suffolk University/ USA Today poll released over the weekend that they would join a Trump Party if he decided to split off from the GOP. A whopping 80% of Republican respondents said they support punishing any Republicans in Congress who voted for Trump’s impeachment. He is still their Dear Leader even in exile.
So the GOP still has a Trump problem. If it loses 20-30% of its voters, it will prove difficult to win any elections whether it’s called the Trump Patriot Party or the plain old GOP. That is because the polarization that powers the extreme right-wing under Trump depends upon having every last self-identified Republican vote their way. There are no more crossovers when it comes to Donald Trump.
This is the dilemma now Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., finds himself trying to navigate as he tries to take back the Senate in 2022. So far, he’s tried to have it both ways. Perhaps he and South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham are playing some elaborate game of “good cop-bad cop” with Graham ostentatiously currying Trump’s favor while McConnell writes op-eds in the Wall Street Journal desperately trying to assuage big money donors and appalled suburban voters with reassurances that the Republican establishment hasn’t gone completely mad.
It’s impossible to know how any of that will work out but whatever happens, the GOP is taking advantage of one major aspect of Trump’s legacy: The Big Lie. A recent Quinnipiac poll found that 76% of Republicans still say they believe there was widespread fraud in the 2020 election and that Trump was the legitimate winner. Republican lawmakers in states across the country are now rushing to pass various draconian vote suppression schemes.
It’s not that they haven’t been doing that all along, of course. That’s conservative electoral strategy 101, about which I’ve written many times. Having lost the popular vote seven out of the last eight presidential elections, they know very well that they do not have the support of a majority of voters in the country. Now that Trump conveniently persuaded GOP voters that the presidential election was stolen from them in broad daylight, the opportunity to curb voting in some new and ingenious ways has presented itself and they are going for it.
So far this year at least 165 bills that would restrict voting access are being considered in state legislatures nationwide reports the Brennan Center for Justice. And the excuse Republicans are using is that they must do this to “restore trust” in the voting system — trust that was destroyed by the outrageous lies of Donald Trump and his henchmen. What a neat trick. Apparently, the only way they can restore trust is to “fix” problems that don’t exist but which also happen to suppress Democratic votes. Take Georgia, for instance, ground zero for Trump’s post-election machinations. According to the Brennan Center, the Republican legislature has proposed curtailing early voting — including on Sundays when historically Black churches have caravaned congregations in what is called “souls to the polls” — making drop boxes more onerous to access and requiring several new steps in order to vote by mail. One of the most counterintuitive restrictions is a new process that disallows dropping ballots off on Election Day and three days prior. It makes no sense. If you’ve forgotten to get your ballot in the mail you should be able to walk it in. What can possibly be a reasonable rationale against that?
You can see how important this issue is right now by the fact that this week’s CPAC conference is featuring seven panel discussions on “election protection” with names like “The Left Pulled the Strings, Covered It Up, and Even Admits It.” “Failed States (PA, GA, NV, oh my!)” and “They Told Ya So: The Signs Were Always There.” Here’s one of the featured speakers, a lawyer who secretly helped Trump behind the scenes:
.@CletaMitchell is a national election law expert who will share her on-the-ground experiences in #Georgia and the true facts about what happened on Nov 3rd and since then at #CPAC2021 in #Orlando. pic.twitter.com/xrL1DqHuFp
— CPAC 2021 (@CPAC) February 20, 2021
It goes without saying that the right-wing media continues to flog this lie but it is spread far and wide by the the major networks as well which continue to feature guests who find subtler ways to poison the public’s mind. Take Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La, on ABC’s “This Week” dodging the question in a different way, suggesting that the “real problem” is that the states didn’t follow their own laws in the election, as some of Trump’s bush league lawyers argued at the time before being shot down by every judge who heard them.
This version of the Big Lie is what MSNBC’s Chris Hayes dubbed “High Hawley-ism”, after the unctuous mewlings of Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo, during the post-election period, which Hayes says is a trial balloon for GOP state legislators to unilaterally award electoral college votes to whomever they choose. You may recall that was what Trump was trying to do up until the very minute his rabid mob sacked the Capitol. Hayes wrote:
This dubious theory, that only state *legislatures* can make these kinds of changes also invites all kinds of mischief by federal judges to reach in and overrule state supreme courts. It didn’t work in 2020, but that doesn’t mean it won’t.
Further, as Scalia memorably noted there is no constitutional guarantee of the right to vote for president; we vote for electors. Every state with R control could pass a law awarding all state electors to the candidate that won the most counties and basically guarantee R victory.
As the New York Times reported at the time, the conservative majority on the Supreme Court gave plenty of signals during the election campaign that they were amenable to this idea, making it clear that they believe state legislatures have the right to enact strict measures against (non-existent) voter fraud. As Wendy R. Weiser, the director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, told the Times:
Even without the reasoning, it’s very clear that what the court has done throughout this election season has made it clear that federal courts are not going to be significant sources of voting rights protection in the lead up to elections. It’s the unique constitutional role of the courts to protect individual rights like voting rights, and they’re treating it like policy decisions.
That’s what Trump put Amy Coney Barrett on the Supreme Court to do for him last fall, but the cards just didn’t fall his way enough to put it to use. Even so, the Big Lie about the stolen election has opened the door for a wave of voter suppression not seen in decades with a Supreme Court ready to rubber stamp it. It may end up being his greatest legacy.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
The Brennan Center for Justice has released a report on gerrymandering — detailing down to map level the danger it poses to voting rights. Continue reading
The post New Brennan Center Report: The Redistricting Landscape, 2021–22 appeared first on BillMoyers.com.
This post was originally published on BillMoyers.com.
Since his inauguration, President Biden has signed a flurry of executive actions, reversing Trump’s discriminatory travel ban, repealing the ban on transgender military service, and re-joining the Paris Agreement. These moves were widely lauded as rejections of the intolerance of … Continue reading
The post Why the Census is Crucial appeared first on BillMoyers.com.
This post was originally published on BillMoyers.com.
From problems with vote-by-mail systems to voter suppression, we travel to Wisconsin and Florida to examine the potential for chaos in the 2020 elections. Then we hear from postal workers about handling the huge number of mail-in ballots.
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This post was originally published on Reveal.
Approaching 2018’s midterms, the country has its eyes locked on Georgia’s governor’s race. It’s a close contest between Stacey Abrams, a former state congresswoman who could become the first-ever black female governor in America and Brian Kemp, a tough-talking Trump loyalist with a penchant for the Second Amendment. The race has become a battleground for many of America’s most pressing concerns about democracy – from voter suppression to election security.
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This post was originally published on Reveal.