After Georgia Republicans lost two seats in the U.S. Senate and helped lose the battle for Donald Trump’s reelection, they decided to do something about it. They passed a voter suppression law.
When your ideas don’t win people over, just keep the other side from getting votes. Republican efforts to suppress the vote have been happening across the country for a while and will only intensify after the recent election.
It’s a little harder to sell your “voter integrity” when one element of it would prevent people from giving water to voters waiting in long lines. (Long lines that are, not coincidentally, more often in precincts where Black people who tend to vote Democratic live.)
As a topper to the recent Jim Crow-style legislation that passed in Georgia, Governor Brian Kemp had a bill-signing photo op with six white male legislators in front of a painting of a plantation that once enslaved 100 people. Oh, and while the photo op was happening, a Black female legislator was being dragged away screaming to a waiting police car for the crime of knocking on the governor’s door. If this was a screenplay, people would say it was just way too obvious and on the nose.