There were two significant news items to come out of Atlanta today.
1. Former State Assembly Minority Leader, once-and-future gubernatorial candidate, and voting rights superhero Stacey Abrams was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. She got the nod for her decade of tireless work at helping people of color overcome Georgia’s history of racism and modern-day lawmakers’ record of voter suppression.
Through her organizations New Georgia Project and Fair Fight, she helped enroll 800,000 voters in the state, which beat back Secretary of State-turned-Governor Brian Kemp’s monster voting purges. Her work happened to win Democrats both Georgia’s electoral votes and both Senate seats, though none of those things were a prerequisite for her nomination.
“Abrams’ work follows in Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s footsteps in the fight for equality before the law and for civil rights,” Lars Haltbrekken, a Socialist Party member of Norway’s parliament, said in a statement. “Abrams’ efforts to complete King’s work are crucial if the United States of America shall succeed in its effort to create fraternity between all its peoples and a peaceful and just society.”
2. Republican lawmakers, having already gerrymandered the state to the point that they kept complete control of the State House despite Biden’s win, introduced a potentially cataclysmic package of new voter suppression laws. Three of their major clauses include the elimination of no-excuse absentee voting, ballot drop boxes, and automatic voter registration.
The first two programs were enacted by Republicans and were more likely to be taken advantage of by Republicans before 2020. But given the danger presented by the COVID-19 pandemic and the GOP’s limiting of voting sites in minority-dominated areas, they became key elements of organizers working to get people of color out to vote. Over 1.3 million people voted absentee before the election, accounting for more than a quarter of all votes.
Obviously, their goal is to simply choke off the voting rights of people of color, who make up the core of the Democratic Party’s base. But they’re using the big electoral fraud lies as cover for their nefarious programs, even after Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said over and over that the election was fraud-free.
“We’ve got to restore confidence in the ballot box. When people lose confidence in the ballot box they ultimately lose confidence in their government,” said Senate President Pro Tem Butch Miller. “Our goal is to be sure every vote is accounted for, accurate and legal.”
That’s bullshit, plain and simple. Republicans know they can’t win fair elections, so they’re working to make them as unfair as possible. And it’s not just in Georgia. As I’ve been covering and the New York Times laid out in a big feature yesterday, the GOP is going to go all-out on gerrymandering to make the votes of people of color irrelevant and cement their hold on power.
This is one of many reasons why the Democrats need to kill the filibuster and pass a massive new voting rights bill like the For the People Act. That (and expanding the Supreme Court to guarantee it survives) is really our only hope of stopping this.
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