Georgia on my Mind.

 

Potus

I try hard to be less obsessive about American politics; a little easier in this relatively Trump-free period. My horror at his person and his personality and his politics has reduced in intensity as his exposure has been reduced and his power, diminished. The profound gratitude for his relative absence from the stage is coupled with relief at the policies of the rather more grown-up Biden administration. However, my interest in American politics continues despite good intentions, as I witness what seems to be the withering of democracy in that benighted country, always pronouncing itself as the greatest while showing, day to day, its entrenched racism and appetite for corruption in the search for political power. One State’s example will suffice before I move on with the vow to donate no more time and space on this blog to American politics!

Anti-democratic reverberations
from Trump's Big Lie.

Georgia ran one of Trump’s “rigged” 2020 elections with alleged widespread voter fraud for which no evidence emerged. Following Trump’s example that no evidence means you can just make up alternative fiction providing it is destructive, this week the Georgia Legislature passed a flurry of measures aimed at protecting the integrity of their elections by restricting voting access, primarily aimed at black voters. The proposals directly target the methods used in the run-up to the 2020 election to increase the black vote. Limiting early Sunday morning voting, for instance, is a direct attack on “Souls to the Polls”, a ‘get-out-to-vote’ exercise led by Black churches. A CNN analysis found that black voters made up 34.6% of the voters who cast early ballots on the three weekends preceding the election; these would be
eliminated under the new proposals. The same bill prohibits free food and drinks from being served to those standing in the apparently endless queues waiting to vote;

volunteers frequently served pizza and chips to voters waiting to vote at predominantly Black precincts in the Atlanta area. Who knew that the battle to reduce the black franchise would importantly involve the humble pizza?

The legislative package which passed in the State Senate, [it must be said, by “a narrow majority”], would also repeal the so-called ‘no excuse absentee voting’, a method used by 1.3 million Georgia voters in last November’s election. I think absentee voting means postal voting for which no excuse is normally needed in democracies; it is simply an alternative way to vote which has in-built safeguards. Repealing this absentee voting measure is deemed advantageous to 65+ white voters while being disadvantageous to millions of black voters. It takes a certain dedication, and perhaps panic, to custom-build this degree of cynical manipulation into the electoral process. AND astonishingly, to do it in the full glare of publicity in the comfortable knowledge that white voters in Georgia approve. Mass white protests are not expected!!

Demonstrators chained together outside the
State Capitol building. March 2021.

While these [and other] Georgian, presumably Republican, measures suggest that truly democratic voting available to all, means that Republicans believe that they cannot easily win fair elections in the future. Martin Luther King, son of the famous father, suggests that more than 250 legislative measures, currently being hastily assembled across 43 states, are a more “sophisticated” version of the Jim Crow practices which prevented black voting in the past. If passed, almost nationwide, these anti-democratic ‘rules’ would certainly reduce the black vote by providing sufficient obstacles to ensure voter apathy. So now we see how the “greatest democracy in the world” operates! Voting suppression aimed at blacks through lawful means. Let us hope that Biden & Co manage to enact counter measures nationally which protect, and encourage, the black vote. Surely at some point, all those red-faced, angry people in MAGA hats which really read, Make America White Again, will begin to understand that America’s future is indeed, multi-coloured. And perhaps ALL Americans will realise that their democracy is currently being degraded possibly beyond repair.

Lt Gov. Geoff Duncan [centre]

Stacey Abrams.

I now read of Hope appearing in Georgia! A leader of the Georgia business community, Andrea Young, said that her group would block all voting restrictions with appeals to the State’s corporate interests. “As a business community, you can’t talk about racial justice and then stand by and let voting rights be pushed back,” she told a CNN interviewer this week. Georgia’s Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan, [no lily-livered liberal one would assume from his website] who normally presides over the Senate, left the chamber Monday during the debate to signal his opposition to ending no-excuse absentee voting and to demonstrate his own stated belief that simply modernising and updating the franchise system would be preferable. And there is, of course, the redoubtable Stacey

Abrams, CEO of Fair Fight Action, the voting rights group which she founded and grew with fanatic energy! Her intentions are to go as far as the courts and Congress in the search for franchise fairness; a large part of the Democrats’ recent election successes in Georgia can be attributed to the Herculean efforts of Stacey et al over several years and it is their successes in November 2020 and January 2021 that are causing the unseemly panic to restrict black votes in Georgia [and far beyond]. As voting rights attorney, Marc Elias said on the Rachel Maddow show, on Tuesday last, “in Iowa, in Arizona, in Montana, in Florida, in Texas, in Missouri, in Georgia …..” democracy is under threat in many states through legislation leading to voting suppression.

Absentee Ballot Application.

Voting line somewhere in Georgia.