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US voting rights

Warnock urges Biden to prioritize fight against voter suppression

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The Georgia Democratic senator the Rev Raphael Warnock delivered a challenge to Joe Biden on Sunday to prioritize the fight against voter suppression, telling the US president: “We have to pass voting rights no matter what.”

Controversial legislation introducing sweeping new restrictions on voting was signed into law by Georgia’s governor, Brian Kemp, last week, the spearhead of an apparent effort by Republicans in dozens of states to dramatically curtail access to the electoral process for Black and other minority voters, who lean Democrat.

The president has slammed Georgia’s move as “un-American” and “Jim Crow in the 21st century,” a reference to laws enforcing racial segregation following the civil war.

But some supporters are worried that his fledgling administration appears more concerned about passing a $3tn economic package focused on infrastructure than tackling what Warnock calls “an assault on democracy”.

“We’ve got to work on the infrastructure of our country, our roads and our bridges, and we’ve got to work on the infrastructure of our democracy,” Warnock told CNN’s State of the Union.

Two pieces of proposed legislation currently before Congress would counter the Republicans’ voter suppression strategy.

The John Lewis Voting Rights Act that Warnock addressed in his first speech on the Senate floor in January would allow courts to block new election legislation by states perceived to violate federal law and impose greater federal oversight on the electoral process.

The second, the For the People Act that has already passed the House, would require states to provide at least 15 days of early voting, allow universal access to mail-in voting, permit election day voter registration and create a national holiday for voting.

Both bills face an uncertain fate in the US Senate, which has created a furious debate over whether Democrats should remove the filibuster and eliminate the 60-vote requirement for passage.

Biden on Sunday urged Congress to pass the two bills, tweeting: “We need to make it easier for all eligible Americans to access the ballot box and prevent attacks on the sacred right to vote.”

The backlash in Georgia was immediate to Kemp’s Thursday afternoon signing of the legislation that imposes stricter ID voter requirements, limits the availability of ballot drop boxes and shortens the time for voters to request and return mail-in ballots.

A Black Democratic state assembly member, Park Cannon, was arrested by Georgia state troopers for knocking on Kemp’s locked door while the signing took place in private. Demonstrators took to the streets of Atlanta on Saturday to support Park.

Meanwhile, the editorial board of the Atlanta Journal Constitution newspaper accused state leaders of “marching backward into history”.

“People … will see these voting access restrictions for what they really are: a house built hurriedly on shifting sands of lies. Verifiable facts or statistics are not part of the foundation for the unwarranted package of changes rapidly signed into law Thursday behind closed doors,” the editorial stated, referring to Donald Trump’s false allegations of fraud in the presidential election in Georgia.

Nikema Williams, a Black newly elected US congresswoman for Georgia, told CNN on Sunday she believed that the victories of the state’s new Democratic US senators, Warnock and Jon Ossoff, following Biden’s November defeat of Trump in a traditionally red state, had fueled a desire for revenge.

“Republicans are pushing back and they’re upset that we were able to win,” she said. “And so they’re going to do everything in their power right now to restrict access to people who mainly look like me from voting.”

Kemp incurred the former president’s wrath in December for failing to support his lies about a stolen election, but has since stated he would back Trump for another White House run in 2024.

Kemp sparked outrage last week by signing the new state legislation in front of a painting of a slavery-era plantation building, and surrounded only by white men.

“I gasped,” Kimberley Wallace, whose family members labored at the plantation for generations, dating back to sharecropping and slavery, told CNN. She said the moment was “very rude and very disrespectful to me, to my family, to Black people of Georgia”.

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Republicans have taken up the politics of bigotry, putting US democracy at risk | Robert Reich

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Republicans are outraged – outraged! – at the surge of migrants at the southern border. The House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, declares it a “crisis … created by the presidential policies of this new administration”. The Arizona congressman Andy Biggs claims, “we go through some periods where we have these surges, but right now is probably the most dramatic that I’ve seen at the border in my lifetime.”

Donald Trump demands the Biden administration “immediately complete the wall, which can be done in a matter of weeks – they should never have stopped it. They are causing death and human tragedy.”

“Our country is being destroyed!” he adds.

In fact, there’s no surge of migrants at the border.

US Customs and Border Protection apprehended 28% more migrants from January to February this year than in previous months. But this was largely seasonal. Two years ago, apprehensions increased 31% during the same period. Three years ago, it was about 25% from February to March. Migrants start coming when winter ends and the weather gets a bit warmer, then stop coming in the hotter summer months when the desert is deadly.

To be sure, there is a humanitarian crisis of children detained in overcrowded border facilities. And an even worse humanitarian tragedy in the violence and political oppression in Central America, worsened by US policies over the years, that drives migration in the first place.

But the “surge” has been fabricated by Republicans in order to stoke fear – and, not incidentally, to justify changes in laws they say are necessary to prevent non-citizens from voting.

designed to make it harder for people to vote – especially the young, the poor, Black people and Hispanic Americans, all of whom are likely to vote for Democrats – by eliminating mail-in ballots, reducing times for voting, decreasing the number of drop-off boxes, demanding proof of citizenship, even making it a crime to give water to people waiting in line to vote.

To stop this, Democrats are trying to enact a sweeping voting rights bill, the For the People Act, which protects voting, ends partisan gerrymandering and keeps dark money out of elections. It passed the House but Republicans in the Senate are fighting it with more lies.

On Wednesday, the Texas Republican senator Ted Cruz falsely claimed the new bill would register millions of undocumented migrants to vote and accused Democrats of wanting the most violent criminals to cast ballots too.

The core message of the Republican party now consists of lies about a “crisis” of violent migrants crossing the border, lies that they’re voting illegally, and blatantly anti-democratic demands voting be restricted to counter it.

The party that once championed lower taxes, smaller government, states’ rights and a strong national defense now has more in common with anti-democratic regimes and racist-nationalist political movements around the world than with America’s avowed ideals of democracy, rule of law and human rights.

Donald Trump isn’t single-handedly responsible for this, but he demonstrated to the GOP the political potency of bigotry and the GOP has taken him up on it.

This transformation in one of America’s two eminent political parties has shocking implications, not just for the future of American democracy but for the future of democracy everywhere.

“I predict to you, your children or grandchildren are going to be doing their doctoral thesis on the issue of who succeeded: autocracy or democracy?” Joe Biden opined at his news conference on Thursday.

In his maiden speech at the state department on 4 March, Antony Blinken conceded that the erosion of democracy around the world is “also happening here in the United States”.

The secretary of state didn’t explicitly talk about the Republican party, but there was no mistaking his subject.

“When democracies are weak … they become more vulnerable to extremist movements from the inside and to interference from the outside,” he warned.

People around the world witnessing the fragility of American democracy “want to see whether our democracy is resilient, whether we can rise to the challenge here at home. That will be the foundation for our legitimacy in defending democracy around the world for years to come.”

That resilience and legitimacy will depend in large part on whether Republicans or Democrats prevail on voting rights.

Not since the years leading up to the civil war has the clash between the nation’s two major parties so clearly defined the core challenge facing American democracy.

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‘Jim Crow in the 21st century’: Biden denounces Georgia Republicans over new voting law

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Joe Biden lambasted a new law in Georgia that imposes sweeping new voting restrictions, calling it “un-American” and “Jim Crow in the 21st century”.

He said in a statement: “Instead of celebrating the rights of all Georgians to vote or winning campaigns on the merits of their ideas, Republicans in the state instead rushed through an un-American law to deny people the right to vote. This law, like so many others being pursued by Republicans in statehouses across the country, is a blatant attack on the constitution and good conscience.”

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Activists in Georgia vowed on Friday to keep up an aggressive campaign to pressure Republicans over their support for the measure, saying they were undeterred by its final passage through the legislature.

Two voting rights groups, the New Georgia Project and Black Voters Matter, filed a federal lawsuit challenging the law hours after Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, signed it on Thursday evening. They say the law violates both the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the US constitution, noting that provisions in it “serve no legitimate purpose other than to make absentee, early, and election-day voting more difficult – especially for minority voters”.

Several more lawsuits are expected in the coming days.

The 98-page measure significantly curtails access to the ballot in the state. It imposes new ID requirements for mail-in voting, limits the availability of ballot drop boxes, gives voters less time to request and return a mail-in ballot, and bars providing food or water to people standing in line to vote. The law also gives the state legislature, currently controlled by Republicans, the authority to appoint a majority of the state election board while also creating a pathway for the board to take over local boards of elections. Those boards make critical decisions on a range of issues, like poll closures and challenges to voter qualifications.

“We are filing this lawsuit for one simple reason: SB 202 should be classified as a violation of voting rights. It is a violation of our dignity and our power,” Nse Ufot, chief executive of the New Georgia Project, said in a statement. “Georgia’s Black, Brown, young and new voters are here to stay. We will organize, knock on doors and show up to the polls 10 times over. And we will fight for solutions and progress for all Georgia voters.”

“They’re changing laws based on lies,” said Helen Butler, the executive director of the Georgia Coalition for the People’s Agenda, who has worked for decades in helping to increase voter turnout among voters of color in the state.

Kemp, a Republican, dismissed criticism of the bill in a statement Friday.

“There is nothing ‘Jim Crow’ about requiring a photo or state-issued ID to vote by absentee ballot – every Georgia voter must already do so when voting in-person,” he said. “President Biden, the left, and the national media are determined to destroy the sanctity and security of the ballot box. As secretary of state, I consistently led the fight to protect Georgia elections against power-hungry, partisan activists.”

Donald Trump, who lost Georgia by around 12,000 votes in 2020, celebrated the changes Friday. In a nod to the political benefit to Republicans, Trump said “too bad they could not have happened sooner.”

Ronna McDaniel, the chair of the Republican National Committee, which recently launched a new effort to coordinate new restrictive voting laws, offered a full-throated defense of the measure on Friday. She pointed to a provision on the bill that expands early voting hours on the weekends to argue that the measure overall made it easier to vote.

“Democrats can lie and spin about the bill all they want, but the real question should be: why are Democrats so terrified of a transparent and secure election process? We look forward to defending this law in court,” she said.

Deborah Scott, the executive director of Georgia Stand-Up, a civic action group, was rallying against the bill outside the state capitol in Atlanta on Thursday when she found out it passed the general assembly. Hours later, she was at a rally outside the headquarters of Delta, one of several companies activists are pressuring to oppose the bill, when she found out the legislature gave it final approval. She said her group and others would continue to pressure companies to take a stand.

Brian Kemp, second right, who signed the bill into law on Thursday. Photograph: Alyssa Pointer/AP

“It’s making our blood hot,” Scott said. “It’s also uniting Black and brown communities of color all across Georgia. It’s uniting women. I know it’s really about power and they see people of color gaining power in southern states like Georgia.”

Park Cannon, a Democratic representative in the state house of representatives, was arrested on Thursday evening as she knocked on the door to Kemp’s office while he was signing the bill. Activists and Senator Raphael Warnock rallied outside the Fulton county jail when she was released late on Thursday.

“Today is a very sad day for the state of Georgia,” Warnock said. “What we have witnessed today is a desperate attempt to lock out and squeeze the people out of their own democracy.”

Scott said the provision in the bill that bans providing food and water appeared to be targeted at her group, which held parties at the polls and provided assistance to people waiting in line to vote. Voters spent hours waiting to vote in line in June and majority-Black precincts were particularly hard hit.

“If they won’t let us give them water at the polls, we’ll make sure they have water before they get to the polls. We’re just going to find a way or make one,” Scott said. “We’re resilient. We have survived slavery. We have survived the first Jim Crow and we’ll definitely survive Jim Crow in a seersucker suit in 2021.”

One provision in the law moves up the application deadline for an absentee ballot to 11 days until election day (voters previously had until the Friday before election day to request). In 2020, there were 17,602 absentee ballots cast that resulted from applications submitted 11 days before election day, according to an analysis by Fair Fight, a voting rights group started by former Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams. Black voters comprised about 37% of the ballots returned during that period, compared with 30% of all absentee ballots submitted.

Richard Barron, the elections director in Fulton county, home of Atlanta, said the law would increase lines at the polls both during early voting and election day. Barron noted his county had used 38 ballot drop boxes in 2020, but now would have to get rid of all but eight. The new law only allows for one drop box for every 100,000 voters and only allows election officials to place them inside early voting sites and keep them open during early voting hours.

“The drop boxes have essentially been rendered useless,” he said. The bill also blocks Barron from again using two mobile voting buses, which the county spent more than $700,000 on.

The bill also shortens the runoff election period from nine weeks to just four, with no guarantee of weekend early voting, which Black voters disproportionately use. Republicans won every statewide runoff race in Georgia between 1992 and 2021, when they lost two US Senate runoff elections. The shorter runoff period, Barron said, would make it harder to get mail-in ballots out to voters.

Republicans who pushed the bill have said it is needed to increase confidence in the election process. Several recounts of the 2020 race showed there was no evidence of fraud.

“What are the parts of the bills that are supposed to increase confidence? That would be my question. I don’t see anything in the bill that does that,” he said.

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Outrage as Georgia Republicans advance bill to restrict voting access

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Georgia lawmakers have advanced a measure that would significantly curtail voting access after a record number of voters propelled Democratic victories in the 2020 race.

The measure scraped through 29-20 in the GOP-controlled Georgia senate, which was the absolute minimum number of votes Republicans needed. Four Republicans, including some in competitive races, sat out the vote, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

The bill, SB 241, would end the right to vote by mail without having to provide an excuse, a policy that Georgia Republicans implemented in the state in 2005. More than 1.3 million people voted by mail in the 2020 general election in the state. Under the bill only people age 65 and older, or who have one of a handful of state-approved excuses, would be allowed to vote by mail. Just 16 other states currently require a voter to give an excuse to vote by mail.

The legislation also would require voters to provide identification information, such as a driver’s license number, both when they apply to vote by mail and when they return the ballot.

Republicans have frequently held up the specter of voter fraud to justify such restrictions, though there were several vote recounts in Georgia in the 2020 race, as well as audits, and officials found no such wrongdoing.

Mike Dugan, the Republican state senator who sponsored the bill, said the lack of widespread fraud should not be an impediment to changing election rules.

“You don’t wait until you have wholesale issues until you try to meet the need,” he said. “You do it beforehand.”

He also said on the senate floor Monday that the bill was needed to reduce the burden on local election officials and to ensure that voters were not disenfranchised.

State senator Elena Parent, a Democrat, said the justification for the bill was a “weaponization of Trump’s lies” about the election.

“It is a willingness and embrace of damage to American democracy,” she said. “The numbers to stop this bill may not be here in this chamber today. But I assure you there are many thousands of Georgians right now whose political spirit is awakened by disgust at modern-day voter suppression.”

A stream of Democrats criticized the measure as a thinly veiled effort to suppress Black and other minority voters in Georgia. Those groups contributed to record turnout in the state in 2020 and helped propel Joe Biden, as well as Democrats senatorial candidates Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, to stunning victories in the state.

“I know racism when I see it,” said Gail Davenport, a Democrat who recalledwatching the Ku Klux Klan marching on Saturdays in Jonesboro, just south of Atlanta. “This is not about the process. This is about suppressing the vote of a certain group of people, especially me, and people who look like me, and I take it personally.”

The bill will now go to the Georgia House of Representatives, which last week approved its own set of voting restrictions, including new limits on early voting and dropboxes. It remains unclear which proposals will ultimately be sent to the governor’s desk once each chamber fully considers the opposite chamber’s bill.

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Lawmakers have until 31 March to send the bills to Governor Brian Kemp’s desk, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

“In the last two election cycles, we saw a dramatic increase in the number of voters of color who voted by mail, the number of young people who used early voting, the number of African Americans who voted on Saturday and Sunday,” Stacey Abrams, the former Georgia gubernatorial candidate, told Mother Jones.

“We saw unprecedented levels of turnout across the board. And so every single metric of voter access that has been a good in Georgia is now under attack.”

Top Republicans in the state, including Lt Gov Geoff Duncan, have said they oppose efforts to get rid of no-excuse absentee voting and Duncan refused to preside over the senate on Monday as it considered the measure to do just that.

At several points during the debate, which stretched around three hours on Monday afternoon, Democrats connected the policies under consideration to those in the Jim Crow south. They noted that some members of the legislature had lived through those policies. Harold Jones II, another Democratic state senator, urged his colleagues to pay attention to Black lawmakers who spoke out against the bill.

“It’s because that most basic right was denied to us. It’s not 1800, it’s not 1850s, it’s right here in this room. Many of the senators that sit here lived through that process,” he said. “Let me tell you, it is not theater. It is not a performance. It is real because we live with it every single day.”

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