As we watch the work of the Fulton County grand jury, let’s also consider what we’re seeing in the current Georgia election. After all, Trump’s big lie is also an old lie — one that state legislators have used to pass legislation designed to make it harder for people to vote, particularly affecting people of color. Georgia was one of only nine states that had such an apparent history of discrimination against voters of color that the entire state fell under the Voting Rights Act provision, which required prior approval from the Department of Justice for changes to voting laws or district lines. These protections, which are part of the Voting Rights Act, were gutted by the Supreme Court in 2013 in Shelby County v. Holder. Thereafter, for the first time since the passage of the law in 1965, Congress failed to find bipartisan support for the renewal of protections. Today, Georgia passed some of the most abusive voter suppression laws we have seen in a country where voter suppression is now running unchecked.
Keep in mind that voter registration was the strategy that elected leaders like former State Rep. Stacey Abrams and other community leaders actively pursued because the Shelby County Supreme Court’s poor decision made eligible Black, Latino and Asian voters more vulnerable to discriminatory voting laws and practices made. Biden won Georgia by just 12,000 votes. That 0.2 percent margin was razor thin, but a historic result. The historically blood-red state is now solid purple because it has nearly two million more eligible voters since 2000. About 70 percent of that increase are black voters, and a whopping 48 percent of the growth is black eligible voters, who make up about a third of Georgia’s electorate.
For some, those numbers are precisely why Georgia removed more than half a million voters from its electoral rolls in 2017, or 8 percent of the electorate. Georgia is a battleground state, but the real fight is for civil rights, voting on which is a fundamental one. Making voting difficult for Georgian citizens has long been based on the unfounded myth of rampant voter fraud, most notably the passage of the state’s most recent and most extreme law, closing polling stations and denying water to voters waiting in long lines.
