What Does Voter Suppression Look Like?

A good History teacher will talk about the Jim Crow era poll taxes and literacy tests used in The South to prevent Black Americans (and sometimes poor whites) from voting, and sometimes even have students have a go on the exclusionary exam, as a way to help students understand and hopefully empathize with the plight of marginalized people trying to vote.

President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act in 1965 outlawing these and other tactics which blatantly suppressed people from accessing their rights as citizens.

To bring time into perspective, the majority of those serving in Congress were born before the VRA became law of the land. Amazingly, 67 of our current members of Congress members were already 18 years old when it became signed (though the right to vote was still 21 in 1965).

Then, in 2013 the VRA was gutted in the Supreme Court, resulting in voting accessibility being chipped away by those trying to control the results of elections. Literacy tests may be a thing of the past, but they have been replaced by precision-like gerrymandering, closing polling locations, purging rolls, voter ID laws, and restricting access to mail-in ballots.

Georgia, a newly-recognized battleground state, has been plagued by ramped up voter suppression through all these tactics, and it is a now-constant battle to overcome them every election cycle.

Today’s voter suppression doesn’t look like its Jim Crow father, but its intent is the same: to prevent specific people from voting, with unfair hurdles put in place by the elected officials who may lose power if the right to free and fair elections was actually upheld.

Closing voting locations and shortening voting periods to create prohibitively long lines has directly impacted a very specific demographic of voters: people who are less flexible with their time.

It affect hourly workers, workers with multiple jobs, people without convenient/reliable transportation, and people without childcare. That these voters may tend to support policies of workplace equity, raising minimum wage, ending employment-based healthcare, expanding public transportation, and better funding childcare, has created an incentive to prevent them from voting at all.

During the 2020 Presidential primary, lines on Election Day surpassed any reasonable wait times, topped with scorching heat and rain. I voted early a couple days prior and endured over two hours in the sun before I was able to cast my vote.

The writing was on the wall: Election Day was about to be a disaster.

So I joined a group of women who started a group chat to coordinate volunteer efforts. I was assigned a voting location, and before dawn headed out with my cooler and donuts to wait for the doors to open at 7. As the line grew, yet never progressed, I felt the panic as people realized they were about to be late for work or school. I took shifts at two other polling locations, where the lines got worse and worse.

“What group are you with?” waiting voters would ask.

”Nobody,” I told them, “A bunch of us who voted early realized what was about to happen and just showed up to help.”

Volunteers took turns bringing cold water and pizza to those of us posted up at the polls to distribute, and even folks who had waited in line would return to restock the supplies.

After 10 hours I was exhausted, sunburned and angry. How had WE seen this coming, but state officials had not?

Less than a year later Georgia made it illegal to pass out water or food to voters to help them be able to stay in line.

The old adage “Time is Money” holds true today and so many people cannot afford to vote; essentially time has become a poll tax.

In response to the failure of the 2020 primary, sweeping changes were made to voting laws, which outlawed passing out water or food to voters, restricted how absentee ballots could be requested and the location and hours they could be dropped off were tightened.

With all eyes on Georgia, my opinion is that the Governor and the Secretary of State didn’t want any more foul-ups.

We all know how that went.

I do wonder, though, what if Georgia voting suppression wasn’t already under scrutiny when then-President Trump called Georgia officials looking for 11,000 votes? Perhaps it’s a bit of an alarmist question, but it’s difficult not to ask when Georgia republican-led offices have continued to prevent voters from casting their vote.

December 2022 brought us yet another hotly contested Senate run-off.

Secretary of State Gabriel Sterling tweeted daily updates in a chipper tone, claiming record voter turnout, as people waited in hours-long lines yet again.

But the numbers don’t lie, and the turnout was not record-breaking.

Instead the lines were long due to a shortening of the voting period, with fewer machines and poll workers.

In fact, the voting period would have been EVEN SHORTER had the Govorner had his way, because the only weekend voting during that period was falling on a holiday weekend. Not Thanksgiving as many assumed, but on Robert E. Lee’s Birthday, (renamed State Holiday since 2015) which is celebrated in Georgia on the Saturday after Thanksgiving rather than his actual birth date.

Republicans sought to block it right up until losing their final appeal on that Wednesday. It should be noted that this merely gave counties the OPTION to open polls that weekend, and several Geogia counties remained closed for the holiday.

Because of work and the unpredictability of my job I voted early on that Saturday. My husband and I waited over two hours, in the chilly November afternoon. The line wrapped around the building but as always, the crowd had a positive energy, despite our wariness from a ceaseless voting season. A few folks back, a mother and her young child got in line behind us. After an hour I noticed the little boy was growing impatient, not understanding what was happening in this line that had barely moved 20 feet. I recall promises of lunch awaiting from his mother. An hour later I looked back and they were gone.

That‘s what voter suppression looks like. I wonder if that mother ever found another opportunity to vote. Nearly one million fewer voters turned out between the last runoff and this one. And I wonder if this the the way Georgia is finding those 11,000+ votes to overturn elections.