06 April 2021 - Georgia's new restrictive election law
Fact check: What the new Georgia elections law actually does
Daniel Dale and Dianne Gallagher (CNN, 31/03/2021)
The new Georgia elections law signed by Republican Gov. Brian Kemp last week has prompted lawsuits from civil rights groups, a sharp denunciation from President Joe Biden, and calls for businesses to take action against the state.
Republican proponents of the law say the critics who accuse them of "voter suppression" are mischaracterizing both their intentions and key provisions of the law. They claim the law not only makes Georgia's elections more secure but that it expands access to voting.
'Jim Crow in the 21st century': Biden denounces Georgia Republicans over new voting law
Sam Levine (The Guardian, 26/03/2021)
Joe Biden lambasted a new law in Georgia that imposes sweeping new voting restrictions, calling it “un-American” and “Jim Crow in the 21st century”.
He said in a statement: “Instead of celebrating the rights of all Georgians to vote or winning campaigns on the merits of their ideas, Republicans in the state instead rushed through an un-American law to deny people the right to vote. This law, like so many others being pursued by Republicans in statehouses across the country, is a blatant attack on the constitution and good conscience.”
The High Cost of Georgia’s Restrictive Voting Bills
Jelani Cobb (The New Yorker, 21/03/2021)
The National Center for Civil and Human Rights, which opened, to great fanfare, in June of 2014, is housed in an austere wood-fibre-and-glass structure in downtown Atlanta. It is situated at 100 Ivan Allen, Jr. Boulevard, a street named for the late mayor who, on his first day in office, in 1962, removed the “White” and “Colored” signs from city hall. The civil-rights center—like the nearby King Center and streets around the city that have been renamed for the architects of the movement—is a step in the continued institutionalizing of Atlanta’s history as a theatre of the struggle for racial equality. Its permanent exhibits, ever mindful of the nation’s enduring racial inequalities, are nonetheless a kind of exultant retrospective: the objects on display there are artifacts of a moral triumph. Across town, in the state capitol, however, a different type of historical preservation has taken root, a campaign designed not to remember the ugliness of the past but to resurrect it.
War over voting laws further corrodes trust in elections
Brett Samuels (The Hill, 05/04/2021)
The messaging war over new voting laws has led to a rise in exaggerated or misleading claims at a time when trust in elections is already fragile after a contentious 2020 campaign.
Both parties have turned to a new law in Georgia as the latest political cudgel to energize their respective bases.
Democrats, led by President Biden, have decried the Georgia law as “Jim Crow on steroids,” statements that have led to GOP criticism that the White House is exaggerating claims about the new measure.