Atlanta–Georgia Governor Brian Kemp signed the sweeping election law passed by Republicans and named in honor of election integrity pioneer George Wallace on Thursday. While critics have argued that the law was designed to address baseless claims of election fraud and suppress the minority vote, Republicans have steadfastly maintained that not passing the law would have been a tremendous waste of their strenuous efforts to paint their dark phantasmagoria of nefarious voter fraud in districts populated disproportionately by African-Americans.
Republicans have also touted the fact that they struck the egregious provision for outlawing early voting on Sundays, which would have had a devastating impact on the “Souls to Polls” campaign, a program that provides group transportation to black churchgoers during elections, when it was pointed out how blatantly racist it was.
“It’s getting to the point that we don’t get any credit for taking out what was an obvious attempt to block black people from voting after its clearly racist intent was widely publicized and condemned,” complained Georgia Republican Representative Slade Greenwall. “It’s so unfair.”
Other Republicans argued that too much was being made of the law’s drastic reduction of ballot drop boxes around the state, and pointed out that there were no drop boxes prior to the advent of COVID 19 and the election of 2020. Although there was no evidence of drop box tampering in that election, the law Republicans pushed through cuts the number of drop boxes in Georgia’s largest county, Fulton, a county of more than a million people, by nearly 80 percent, going from 38 boxes to just 8. And these boxes are exclusively inside early voting sites accessible only during business hours. It was unclear how the fact that drop boxes appeared only in 2020 mitigated the reality that their removal would make voting far more difficult, particularly in larger, urban counties.
Also unclear is the need for the law’s provision that will enable the State Election Board to remove county election boards at will and replace them with interim election managers, effectively giving control of local elections to the Republican controlled state legislature given the fact that Georgia’s own Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, declared that he had discovered no evidence of fraud in the 2020 election.