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In Senate Runoff, Georgia's Organizers Defy GOP Attack On Voting Rights

In Senate Runoff, Georgia's Organizers Defy GOP Attack On Voting Rights

On the only day of Sunday voting before Georgia’s U.S. Senate runoff, the auto-parts store parking lot across the street from Atlanta’s Metropolitan Library looked and sounded more like a block party than a get-out-the-vote event.

“We’re having a good time on this corner. If you feel the spirit, let me hear your horn. Come on!” bellowed D.J. Concrete Kash above a sound system that played gospel music and was next to several orange shade tents filled with free food, water, hand warmers and voter guides.

“We have five or six organizations out here coming together to say, ‘Hey, we believe in what you all are doing,” said Chandra Gallashaw, a community organizer. “Georgia Stand Up is over there. The NAACP. Black Voters Matter. We Vote, We Win… It has nothing to do with anyone running for office. It has to do with these people over there in line exercising their right, their constitutional right to vote.”

The tables at this pro-voter effort comprised some of Georgia’s oldest and newest non-profit civil rights groups. While they were careful not to endorse any candidate, their presence was a powerful rejoinder to the state’s GOP-led government, whose 2021 legislation banned giving food and water to anyone waiting to vote, among other roll backs of voting options.

“As we know, our governor [Republican Brian Kemp] banned us from being able to give water in line. We have to be 150 feet away from the polls,” said Mykah Owens, a campaign associate with We Vote We Win. “One of our guys measured and made sure that we’re far enough from the polls so we won’t get in trouble.”

“We had to do something,” said Gallashaw. “The fact we cannot give water in line to people who stand in line for two or three hours… Some of these folks are 70, 80 years old. Some of them are diabetic. They have health issues.”

A similar “Party to the Polls” was held at three of Fulton County’s two-dozen voting sites on Sunday and will continue through the early voting period which ends on Friday. While the event was a rarity in this populous county, its significance was not lost on Black voters.

“I love the fact that although they tried to pass a law where you couldn’t give water and things to people in line, they just put it across the street,” said Yasha Yisrael, who, with her husband, Chasum Yisrael, were sipping free smoothies from one of three food trucks. “It’s amazing.”

“It’s something that should have been done all along and I hope they continue it,” she continued, “because it does encourage more people who would not normally vote who are registered to come in and vote because they feel this sense of community.”

“Every effort is being tried to stop our right to vote,” said Chasum Yisreal. “We’ve got to be smart about it.”

The couple said that they did not know who the newer civic groups were. But across the state’s 159 counties, a coalition of community-based organizations, from mainstays like the NAACP and sororities and fraternities from historically Black colleges and universities to new groups targeting younger people, are making a determined effort to turn out voters for the Senate runoff and to keep in touch year round to try to change state’s political representation.

Georgia, as Rep. Nikema Williams told the Democratic National Committee last June in a bid to urge the DNC to move up its 2024 presidential primary date, is one of the nation’s most racially diverse states with growing Black, Latino and Asian-Pacific Islander populations. It is the fifth-ranked state for women-owned businesses and 41 percent of all businesses are minority owned, which is double the national average. But cosmopolitan Atlanta is surrounded by the old South, where conservatives continue to dominate county and municipal government.

That landscape has turned every recent Georgia election into a struggle to engage voters. The Senate runoff was no exception and is operating under some new voting rules.

This is the first time that a statewide runoff is being held one month after Election Day. That timetable is half as long as the state’s two U.S. Senate runoff elections in 2020 and was created by the GOP’s 2021 legislation. One impact of the shorter timetable is to block new voters from registering. It also is too tight a timeline to obtain and return a mailed-out ballot.

Additionally, the legislation shortened the runoff’s early voting period to one week, although some metro counties expanded it through this past weekend, and a few counties started before Thanksgiving. (Republicans tried to bar voting on Saturday but lost in court last week.)

The early turnout numbers suggest that voters are not deterred by the 2021 law’s tightening of voting options. On Sunday, Gabriel Sterling, the chief operating officer for Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, tweeted that some metro Atlanta voting sites were experiencing waits of two hours. The wait at the Metropolitan Library’s first day of early voting on Saturday was as long, said We Vote, We Win’s Owens.

“We had over a two-hour wait yesterday. You usually don’t see that until the end of early voting – more towards the Election Day,” she said. “People are paying attention.”

Steven Rosenfeld is the editor and chief correspondent of Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He has reported for National Public Radio, Marketplace, and Christian Science Monitor Radio, as well as a wide range of progressive publications including Salon, AlterNet, The American Prospect, and many others.

This article was produced by Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

2021 GOP Turnout Proves Better Ballot Access Benefits Both Parties

2021 GOP Turnout Proves Better Ballot Access Benefits Both Parties

This article was produced by Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Making access to a ballot and voting more accessible does not necessarily help Democrats and hurt Republicans, despite conventional political wisdom to the contrary, as the November 2 election clearly demonstrated.

In Virginia and New Jersey, which both held statewide elections and where state officials had instituted more ways for voters to vote—early and on Election Day—Republicans turned out in record numbers.

In Virginia, Republican Glenn Youngkin was elected governor by nearly 80,000 votes, defeating the former Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe, who ran a lackluster campaign. In New Jersey, incumbent Gov. Phil Murphy, a Democrat, was leading by 15,000 votes, with the uncounted ballots in Democratic strongholds.

But, as Jonathan Last noted in The Bulwark, "challenger Jack Ciattarelli found an extra 300,000 Republican votes that weren't there for the GOP candidate in 2017. Murphy is going to hang on to win, but the story is the Republican turnout."

Analysts will offer many reasons for Democrats' showing. But expanding ways to vote should not be among them, election experts said, even though former President Donald Trump has been attacking easier access since mid-2020 when many states expanded voting options in response to the pandemic.

"One myth that both parties completely agree on is that high turnout always benefits Democrats," said David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Research and Innovation. "It is an article of faith among both Democrats and Republicans that this is true and yet it is completely false."

"We see repeatedly that it's completely false in places like Florida and Ohio, which had extensive mail, early in-person, and Election Day voting, record turnout in 2020, [and] record margins for Republicans," Becker continued. "In places like Virginia and New Jersey yesterday, [where it was] easy to early vote, easy to mail vote, [there was] record turnout [and] over performance by Republicans."

Becker's point underscores that it is the candidates and their messaging, not making voting harder for perceived blocs, that is and should be the determining factor in voter turnout. That view, however, is at odds with many pro-Trump legislators who have led post-2020 efforts to curtail voting options after their candidate lost the presidential election a year ago.

"You actually don't change the political dynamic significantly," Becker said. "You just make things better for voters to make their voices heard."

A Closer Look at Virginia

Virginia's 2021 election broke turnout records for statewide elections. A closer look suggests that many Republicans and Democrats differed on when they voted. More Democrats than Republicans voted before Election Day, either with mailed-out ballots or at an early in-person site. More Republicans, in contrast, voted on Election Day, when two-thirds of the election's voters cast ballots.

While Virginia's Democratic-majority state legislature passed numerous voting reforms earlier this year that were intended to make voting easier for its base, it is also true that expanding early voting meant that fewer people would be voting on Election Day—which made Tuesday's voting more expeditious.

But tinkering with the rules of voting will not deter a motivated electoral base., said Chris Sautter, an election lawyer specializing in recounts and an American University adjunct professor.

"All these reforms were written by Democrats to increase Democratic turnout," he said. "The Democratic turnout was not bad. It's just that the Republican turnout was through the roof. Youngkin did better than Trump ever did in these areas that Trump opened up. Trump got people to vote who had never voted before and Youngkin surpassed him by quite a bit."

Organizers seeking to turn out young and infrequent voters in the state's largest communities of color said that many voters were not interested in McAuliffe, who defeated two Black women in the primary and sided with fossil fuel interests as governor but more recently sought to portray himself as an environmentalist.

"Only 15 percent of our voters age 18 to 39 showed up in early voting," Andrea Miller, executive director of the non-partisan Center for Common Ground, said. "They were not having it. They were saying, 'We're not voting for the lesser of two evils.' In my mind, that was a progressive and BIPOC [Black, Indigenous, people of color] protest. And young people didn't vote at all."

So, even though Virginia's legislature adopted 2021's more expansive set of pro-voter reforms, their ticket didn't compel voters to take advantage of easier ways to vote. On the Republican side of the aisle, voters faced no obstacles.

Steven Rosenfeld is the editor and chief correspondent of Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He has reported for National Public Radio, Marketplace, and Christian Science Monitor Radio, as well as a wide range of progressive publications including Salon, AlterNet, The American Prospect, and many others.

Sen. Joe Manchin

Why Democrats Should Take Manchin’s Voting Rights Deal

Reprinted with permission from Alternet

Sen. Joe Manchin's (D-WV) opposition to Democrats' push to expand voting rights has been a deep point of contention that has left the lawmaker on the outs with his political party. However, Democratic lawmakers may want to take a hard look at his latest counteroffer, according to election law scholar Richard Hasen.

In a piece published by Slate, Hasen, a professor of law and political science at the University of California, Irvine School of Law, laid out the details of Manchin's counteroffer to the "For the People" bill, HR-1. The lawmaker's proposal addresses a number of the original bill's highest priorities where voting rights and campaign finance are concerned.

According to Hasen, Manchin's proposal includes "a requirement of 15 days of early voting in federal elections, automatic voter registration, limits on partisan gerrymandering, and improved campaign finance disclosure."

The lawmaker is also in agreement on "extending campaign finance provisions to communications on the internet and to currently non-disclosing 'dark money' groups, prohibiting false information about when, where, and how people vote, and an updated pre-clearance process."

While it is clear that the West Virginia Senator's proposal isn't exactly what Democratic lawmakers are advocating, Hasen suggests Democrats should at least consider the offer. He acknowledged that while many of the line items Democrats initially proposed are not included, most of those items are far less pressing.

Hasen explained why:

"Democrats should jump at the opportunity to pass such a bill, but it is also fair to acknowledge it is far from perfect, Many of the darlings in the For the People Act are not on Manchin's list, such as felon re-enfranchisement, public financing of congressional elections, restructuring the often-deadlocked Federal Election Commission, and limiting state voter purges. Not only would the Manchin proposal continue to allow states to engage in voter purges, it also will require some form of voter identification for voting in federal elections, though in a more relaxed form than some of the strict rules some states have enacted."

Hasen also noted that voter identification could actually prove to be beneficial if implemented in a fair manner. Moving forward with Manchin's proposal could also open the door for bipartisan discussions instead of the bill just dying in the Senate.

vote, election

New Poll: 'Sizable Majorities' Favor Voting Rights And Oppose GOP Suppression

A new poll finds that many of the provisions within a voting rights bill congressional Democrats are looking to pass are widely popular with Americans -- a sign that GOP outcry against the legislation has not worked.

The Pew Research Center survey found that "sizable majorities favor several policies aimed at making it easier for citizens to register and vote," with 61 percent of voters supporting automatically registering eligible citizens to vote, 63 percet saying anyone should be able to vote absentee without an excuse, 70 percent supporting giving people their voting rights back after serving their felony sentences, and 78 percent supporting two weeks of in-person early voting.

All of those provisions are within the "For the People Act," which House Democrats passed in March, and Senate Democrats are now rallying behind.

Republicans have vilified the act, making hyperbolic claims and flat-out lying about what the bill would do in order to justify their opposition to it.

Among the lies Republicans have told about the legislation is that it will allow undocumented immigrants to vote, makes elections more vulnerable to foreign interference, and rig elections in Democrats' favor.

None of those claims have much merit. Rather, the legislation would:

  • Require states to implement automatic voter registration for federal elections. That means anytime an eligible voter has contact with a state agency — most often the Department of Motor Vehicles — they are automatically registered to vote. If they do not want to be registered, they can opt out;
  • Give money for states to use paper ballots to prevent foreign interference in vote totals;
  • Allow anyone who wants to vote by mail to do so without needing an excuse, as well as require states to have early voting for federal elections;
  • And restore voting rights to those who have completed felony sentences.

Privately, Republicans worry that making it easier to vote will hamper GOP chances in future elections.

"H.R. 1's only objective is to ensure that Democrats can never again lose another election, that they will win and maintain control of the House of Representatives and the Senate and of the state legislatures for the next century," Cruz told a conservative group in a private call, according to the Associated Press.

It's a belief held by Donald Trump, who has said publicly that he believes Republicans wouldn't win elections again if people have easier access to the ballot box. It's believed to be part of the reason he railed against the explosion in absentee ballots in the 2020 election, which he blames in part for his loss.

And Trump's belief that more access to voting hurts their chances has led to an explosion of voter suppression legislation from Republicans in state legislatures across the country.

A number of states have already passed laws restricting the right to vote.

For example, Republicans in Iowa shortened the state's early, in-person voting period from 29 days to 20 days. And Texas Republicans are looking to make it even harder to vote by mail by requiring the disabled to show written proof of their disability in order to receive their absentee ballot.

Passing the "For the People Act" would block almost every single GOP voter suppression bill that has passed or is moving toward passage across the country.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.