Photo courtesy of Arnaud Jaegers, Unsplash
Georgian Legislation passed a law requiring voter IDs and extending electoral rights in the state. This somehow sparked controversy that prompted large corporations to leave Georgia and move their business to another location.
Major League Baseball (MLB), Coca-Cola and Delta threatened to cease operations in Georgia. The MLB even pulled its all-star game out of Atlanta and moved it to Denver, despite Colorado having similar voting and voter ID laws that Georgia has implemented. Atlanta planned to play the game to honor the late Hank Aaron, who is an icon in the Braves franchise.
If MLB commissioner Rob Manfred campaigns for voting rights, he could have kept the game in Georgia.
One of the largest parts of the invoice This implies that it is an offense to give food and water to voters standing in line. In general, election officials are not allowed to give food or water to any voter standing in line. Therefore, an election worker who dispenses bottled water with a candidate sticker is considered to be campaigning, which is illegal. Election workers are said to be non-partisan and not show their political leanings by handing out bottles of water with the name of a political candidate on them.
President Joe Biden falsely claimed that the law required polling stations to close at 5:00 p.m. Regarding polling stations that close at 5 p.m., the bill does not specifically state when polling stations would close. All polling stations across Germany close at 8 p.m.
There is no early voting in Biden’s home state of Delaware. The Georgian electoral law provides for an early vote of up to 17 days. Biden could have campaigned for it during his 36 years in the US Senate.
Days after all of this happened, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy (with Stacey Abrams by his side) signed a bill “extending the vote”. However, the bill signed by Murphy only allowed nine days of early voting compared to 17th Days in Georgia. If Murphy really cared about voting, he would have extended early voting to the same length or longer than Georgia.
Bernice King, the executive director of the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, said in a Tweet that those calling for boycotts should stop because doing so would harm middle class workers and “would increase the harm of racism and classism”. I agree with King here because many of the companies that boycott Georgian law serve the middle class and the middle class rely on these industries every day.
Everyone should have the right to vote. All 50 states should adopt laws similar to Georgia as a model. Congress should then act and pass federal laws relating to voter ID cards to secure future elections.
amiragli@ramapo.edu
