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President Joe Biden won Georgia. That’s a statement of fact but such a shock to the system for Georgia Republicans that many flat-out refuse to accept reality. They’ve convinced themselves that fraud existed. This is not a new brand of madness, however. It has gnarled roots twisting back to Reconstruction, when newly freed and enfranchised Black residents started voting in large numbers. White conservatives resorted to legal trickery and outright violence to suppress the Black vote.
Republicans chafe at the Jim Crow comparisons, but you can’t ignore the racial aspect. Donald Trump won 69 percent of the white vote in Georgia in 2020, an overwhelming victory if white people were the only ones who voted in Georgia. However, they were just 61 percent of the electorate, and Biden crushed Trump among the remaining 39 percent. A similar pattern resulted in Democrats flipping both of Georgia’s US Senate seats.
That is the key context when discussing the voter suppression laws that passed after 2020. Trump cronies, including Michael Flynn and Patrick Byrne, funded a group that challenged the eligibility of tens of thousands of voters, overwhelming county boards just weeks before the midterms.
PREVIOUSLY:
This group, which is too busy fighting democracy to come up with a name, took a chainsaw to the voter rolls in Gwinnett County, which Biden won by almost 20 points. Gwinnett is one of the most diverse counties in the US, and Black people account for roughly a third of the population. Trump begged Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (before outright threatening him and then begging some more) to “find” him the 11,780 votes needed to win Georgia. Republicans don’t need to “find” votes if they can just stop enough Black people from voting outright.
Georgia Republicans passed SB 202 in response to Biden’s win and Trump’s Big Lie. The bill lets a single person challenge the registration of an unlimited number of voters. Voters must show up for these mass challenge hearings within 10 days or they’re purged from the rolls. As the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports, absolutely “no fraud has been proved among registrants who moved from Georgia or used P.O. boxes as their addresses.”
Tracy Taylor and Barbara Helm both had their registrations challenged and cancelled. Their offense is that they’re homeless, which is not a crime. Homeless people are citizens and should still have the right to vote.
Taylor is registered at a post office box. She told the Fulton County elections board this month, “If I had a residential address, I would be using it. I’m trying to get back to a normal life.”
Helm sleeps in her car so she’s also registered to vote at a PO Box. The county elections board upheld the challenge against her in June. She said, “You shouldn’t just block voters because of the address. My vote should be counted. I don’t feel like they should have done that to me.”
These women already live on the margins but still want to perform their civic duty. That’s admirable, and instead white conservatives want to deny them this key tether to the world. Joel Natt, the Republican vice chairman of the Forsyth elections board, is not moved by Helms’s story. Natt insists the homeless woman should’ve checked her mail more regularly and responded to the notification letters.
“It could have been rectified and it wouldn’t have been a matter to be addressed,” said Natt, who made the motion to remove Helm’s registration at the county’s June elections board meeting. “All I can say is, she had time on her side to correct this.”
Georgia conservatives have challenged more than 65,000 voter registrations across the state this year. County election boards have upheld about 3,200 of them. Those who are challenged are often caught by surprise when they arrive at their polling place. When she tried to vote last week in Fulton County, Stephanie Friedman, a naturalized US citizen since 2016, was told her registration was challenged but she was eventually able to cast a regular ballot when election officials cleared up the issue for her. That’s a more bittersweet than outright happy ending. Republicans are deliberately erecting barriers to voting so that frustrated and demoralized citizens will eventually just give up.
This is a damnable history repeating itself.
[The Guardian / Atlanta Journal-Constitution]
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