It is necessary for the good people of Georgia to share with you a story of my family that may correspond to the times we are living in our state today.
As a high school student in the early 1960s, I remember my mother’s attempts to register for voting in Dougherty County, Georgia. At that time there was a competency test that negroes had to pass in order to be eligible to vote. My mother had to write the “Constitution Preamble” without missing words, misspelling words, or missing / misusing punctuation marks.
She tried many times to do the job but was not given the right to vote until the 1965 Suffrage Bill was passed in the US Congress.
Get it now, my mother was a very intelligent person. She worked her way up from “laundry” for white families, worked in a restaurant and movie theater, became an elementary school teacher, and eventually retired as a high school media specialist.
Now that all of these previous hurdles have been cleared to get the right to vote, we’re starting again. Jim Crow raised his head again in this state. Blacks and whites were beaten and killed to get the right that everyone could choose.
This month, the Georgia governor secretly signed a new law making it harder, not easier, for people of color to vote in the state of Georgia.
This new law claims to “root out” fraud in elections in Georgia. If this is indeed the draft of this new law, I have a few questions for the members of the General Assembly of Georgia who voted in favor of this law.
How can you reduce fraud by not giving water to people who have stood in line for hours? How does eliminating the number of postal ballot papers or “drop boxes” for postal ballot papers reduce fraud?
Georgia’s own foreign minister, a Republican, said the 2020 general election would be fraud-free after checking the censuses three times. The 45th President of the United States put pressure on the SOS to find enough votes to overcome its deficit and overtake candidate Biden in Georgia’s presidential election.
This was the only attempt at fraud in Georgia’s 2020 elections. The real problem here is that the Republican Party in Georgia lacks ideas on how to meet the needs of Georgia’s changing demographic situation.
Our elected officials across the state must also change to meet the needs of their people. It’s worth it in all of us. Honor this value. Don’t take us back to the times my mother’s generation struggled with. Our state deserves better.
Robert Thorpe
Gainesville