The question of voter suppression is increasingly front page news across the nation. Nowhere is this more dramatic than here in Georgia. The Republican-controlled legislature has introduced two bills to restrict voting in the state by ending automatic voter registration, weakening absentee voting and banning drop boxes for mail ballots.<\/p>\n
Coming on the heels of Republican losses in the recent election, this recent effort to ensure honest elections is disingenuous, to say the least. It is especially suspect given the long history of voter suppression of Black citizens in Georgia.<\/p>\n
Democrats want to make it easier for more people to vote and\u00a0 Republicans want to restrict voting opportunities because Democrats do better when more people vote and Republicans do worse. The simple fact is that there are more registered Democrats than Republicans in the country. Black Georgians, who represent 31.9% of the state population, vote overwhelmingly for Democrats.<\/p>\n
The right to vote for most Americans has been a long time coming. Voting has been limited since the beginning of the Republic. Only a small percentage of white males could vote until universal male suffrage was initiated during the Jacksonian era. The 15th Amendment granted all citizens the right to vote regardless of race in 1870, but Indians couldn\u2019t vote until they were given citizenship in 1924. Women in most states couldn\u2019t vote until the 19th Amendment in 1920. And the reality is that many Black Americans had difficulty voting prior to the passage of the Voting Rights act of 1965. Before then Southern states successfully disenfranchised Black voters through violence, poll taxes, literacy tests, fraud, restrictive registration practices and use of the \u201cwhite\u201d primary.<\/p>\n
In Shelby County v. Holder<\/em> (2013) the Supreme Court revoked requirements for certain states with histories of voter suppression to clear all changes in voting procedures with the federal government. Since then nearly 1,000 polling locations across the country, mostly in majority Black precincts, have been shut down. Early voting has been curtailed; voter rolls have been purged and stricter voter ID laws proposed. In Georgia, Stacey Abrams, the Black Democratic candidate for governor hotly contested the 2018 gubernatorial election for alleged voter suppression.<\/p>\n The current worry about voter fraud and the call for election integrity by the Republicans are attempts to hold on to power. It is not about the honesty of elections. This is especially clear in Georgia where Republican election officials documented that there was virtually no election fraud in the 2020 election.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The question of voter suppression is increasingly front page news across the nation. Nowhere is this more dramatic than here in Georgia. The Republican-controlled legislature has introduced two bills to restrict voting in the state by ending automatic voter registration, weakening absentee voting and banning drop boxes for mail ballots. Coming on the heels of…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-552","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-by-robert-fischer"],"yoast_head":"\n