(AFP) – Tierra Hollis fans herself with a sheaf of flyers in the late summer heat as she goes door-to-door in Georgia as part of the Black Voters Matter Fund’s push to fight alleged US disenfranchisement after recent electoral law changes.
“We get out here and we tell them their rights because the government might not always tell them,” said the 22-year-old, part of the organization’s efforts to make sure sweeping voting reform has not removed legitimate voters from rolls ahead of key midterm elections held on November 3. Voting reform has become a flashpoint issue ahead of the election, with President Donald Trump insisting that laws need widespread changes to ensure election integrity, and rights groups arguing restrictive new laws are curbing voter access.
Trump has frequently alleged voter fraud since he lost the US presidential election in 2020, and Georgia was at the center of his unfounded claims. In August 2023, an Atlanta grand jury indicted Trump and 18 others under racketeering laws on charges including that he called a senior official in the southern state and demanded that he “find” 11,780 votes needed to reverse his loss there in 2020. The charges were dropped after Trump was re-elected for his second term.
Since 2021, US states have passed dozens of “restrictive” voting laws that cause voter suppression, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. This year alone has seen nine states pass 12 such laws, the rights group says. Since Trump’s election loss in 2020, Republican-led Georgia has enacted a slew of election reform laws that have tightened voter access by requiring additional forms of identification, narrowed access to absentee ballots and voting dropboxes, and vastly expanded the scope of ways that anyone can challenge voter eligibility.
One of the oft-ridiculed clauses in the new Georgia laws makes it illegal to offer food or water to voters standing in long lines outside polling places — a regular occurrence in heavily populated urban areas that have higher Black and working-class populations. “All of this is to gain power. All of this is to keep Black and Brown people in our place,” Wanda Mosley, deputy policy director at Black Voters Matter Fund (BVMF), told AFP. “I don’t have time to go back down to the county board of elections office with more ID when I’m probably working two jobs just to keep food on the table,” she added, explaining how mass voter challenges and additional requirements disproportionately hit working-class voters.
“I feel like the Republican Party has found itself in a situation where they want to go back to what this country was like pre-Reconstruction, pre-Emancipation,” she said, referring to a period in the 1800s when slavery was legal in the United States.
Republicans deny allegations that the laws target Black and working-class people, arguing that reforms were necessary to combat alleged voter fraud. “I see this as being pro-America, pro-accuracy, pro-transparency and pro-election integrity,” Georgia lawmaker John LaHood said of one of the major electoral law changes when it passed. The new laws also include more explicit rules for how ballots are handled and counted, mandate hand recounts in close races, and require Georgia to move to a non-QR-code based system by 2028. The latter is a key Trump demand that stems from unproven conspiracy theories that voting machines in areas where he lost were hacked to alter the results.
Noah Beck, the election director in Polk County responsible for his region’s 30,000 voters, says the voting machines are 100 percent accurate, but that he is open to whatever changes are required to gain voter trust. “I hate a world where election legislation is politicized because ultimately it is an objective goal that we all have is that we want safe and secure elections,” he said.
For Carol Anderson, a professor of African American Studies at Emory University, however, the argument that the reforms are needed to regain voter trust lost due to unfounded allegations is “pernicious.” “It’s putting up these barriers, but it’s putting a fig leaf in front of these barriers, and that fig leaf is ‘election integrity,'” she told AFP. “What actually is happening is it is trying to destroy democracy by removing American citizens from access to the ballot box.”
Back in Macon, one of Hollis’s colleagues out canvassing voters to make sure they make it to the polls is Octavia Brooks, a working-class grandmother. “Back then, when my granny was coming up, she wasn’t allowed (to vote),” she said. “That’s why people like me get out in the community, and we give example, and let them know it’s okay for you to voice your opinion.”
– Asad HASHIM
© 2024 AFP
