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In Georgia this week, a Democratic primary election for a U.S. Senate seat was won by Jon Ossoff, who, despite having some considerably pedigreed competition, managed to secure enough votes to avoid a runoff election. These results are obviously a reason for fans of Ossoff to be cheerful; they’re potentially good news for fans of the vanquished candidates, too, in that they won’t have to go out and vote again until November. Once again, we were treated to the familiar sights of long lines and excruciating waits and news, after the fact, of huge screw-ups at the polls. Democrats feel like they might have Georgia within their grasp, electorally speaking, but the state looks to be ground zero for multiple voting rights calamities that would have to be addressed first.
The coronavirus pandemic continues to have a major impact on voting, and it was no different in Georgia, where the need to practice social distancing made the sight of the lines especially jarring, given the sheer amount of geography they had to occupy. The scene was sufficiently despondency-inducing that Washington, D.C., restaurateur José Andrés (who would be a fitting replacement for any downed Confederate statuary in the nation’s capital, just putting that out there!) announced on Twitter that he’d be deploying the considerable might of his World Central Kitchen infrastructure to “set up a water, food, and restrooms support system to help people standing long hours on a line,” on Election Day in November. It’s probably not great that Andrés’s efforts, which were originally conceived as a sort of rapid-response system to deliver food to the sites of global disasters, has in recent years had to provide such services to Americans struggling in the face of government dysfunction, but it will be good to see a small army of people devoted to decency at our polls in November.
Nevertheless, the problems in Georgia are too large to be solved with chafing trays and Porta-Potties. As CNN reported, this most recent primary election was something of a debacle. By the time the last voters straggled into their polling places, the state government had initiated an investigation “into a new system that cost over $100 million” to deploy that resulted in voting machines that were “misused, missing or malfunctioning.” This “investigation” is likely to be contentious, as state and county officials have already spent the ensuing days at each other’s throats, blaming one another for the chaos, instead of taking responsibility. |
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| But it’s too easy to view what happened in Georgia as a series of bugs in the system and miss some of the glaring features of the system that worked precisely as they were designed. As CBS News reported, Georgia’s Fulton County was the locus of the state’s election-day disarray and, as you may have already surmised, that county happens to have the largest population of black voters. As The Guardian’s David Daley noted, it was hard to watch “the nearly seven-hour lines in many minority communities contrasted with the breeze in whiter, wealthier suburbs—without thinking, ruefully, of U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts’ 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder that ripped the heart from the Voting Rights Act.”
In that decision, Roberts, referring to the 1965 act, famously declared, “More than 40 years ago, this court concluded that ‘exceptional conditions’ prevailing in certain parts of the country justified extraordinary legislation otherwise unfamiliar to our federal system.… In part due to the success of that legislation, we are now a very different nation.” He then led a gutting of some vital safeguards that had long protected the voting rights of black Americans. (Ruth Bader Ginsburg, dissenting, likened Roberts’s point of view to a childlike naïveté, the sort that would lead one to throw away one’s umbrellas because the sun happened to be shining.)
TNR’s own Matt Ford has weighed in on that matter, in a piece titled, “How the Roberts Court Caused Georgia’s Election Mess.” In it, Ford recounts how Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, who had previously served as the state’s secretary of state, led a “one-man mission to prove Roberts wrong,” purging “more than 500,000 voters from the rolls under his watch in 2017” and freezing “53,000 voter applications,” through a policy that allowed state officials to “reject voter registration forms if the applicants’ information doesn’t precisely correspond with state and federal records—even if it’s only off by a comma or a hyphen.” Of those rejected forms, some 70 percent were filled out by African Americans.
Ford’s piece goes a long way to explaining the chaos that occurred in Georgia this week. It gives me no pleasure to report, however, that TNR originally published this piece in November 2018, in an effort to explain the chaos in that year’s election. Perhaps you should just bookmark it.
—Jason Linkins, Deputy Editor |
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| Here’s a funny story: The New York Times, up until last week, employed an editor at its opinion section who created a business model in which contributors were sent out into the wide world to get stoned in public for the sake of clicks. That editor, James Bennet, has been cashiered, and we have postmortems: Osita Nwanevu examines the new trend of high-minded publishers seeking out authors who want to eliminate their constitutional rights to publish; Rachel Hawley makes the case that the money you’re sending to the Times might be better spent on journalism in your local community, at least until the Gray Lady sorts out her current dysfunctions. Elsewhere, Nwanevu takes stock of an incredible shift of opinion in favor of the Black Lives Matter movement, Tim Noah reminds us that the black wage gap matters as well, and Libby Watson warns that there’s nothing that makes a slogan matter less than when it’s appropriated by cynical politicians. Finally, be sure to check out the latest piece from David Roth, which examines the current state of American policing and the policy rot that brought us to this moment. As always, you are invited to visit The Soapbox on your Sunday for all sorts of great stories from TNR. |
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