Georgia GOP May Outlaw Mail-In-Voting for January Senate Run-Off
By: Herbert Dyer
Tags: Stacey Abrams, Politics, Georgia, Racism, Senate

Georgia GOP May Outlaw Mail-In-Voting for January Senate Run-Off

We Are About to Witness a Whole New Level of Voter Suppression

This map/graph only depicts GOP voter suppression efforts in 2010–11. In 2013, after the Supreme Court gave them the go-ahead, every single state wherein Republicans rule, voter suppression become a cardinal rule. Image: https://www.bing.com/images/search?view=detailV2&ccid=IdyO01bz&

Control of the US Senate now hinges on the January 5 run-off election in Georgia. The failure of both Georgia’s Republican Senators to achieve fifty percent of the vote during the presidential election has set up an all-or-nothing situation in the Senate. Two Republicans are pitted against two Democrats, and the Democrats must win both seats in order to hand President-Elect Biden a Democratic-controlled Senate, together with an already Democratic-controlled House of Representatives.

As expected, the Republican candidate for Senate in Alaska has just this week been declared the victor, giving the Republicans fifty seats. Thus, by winning just one of Georgia’s contested seats, Mitch McConnell’s (R-KY) Republicans will be in position to place a likely unbreakable stranglehold on any bills Biden and the Democrats attempt to get through Congress and onto President-Elect Biden’s desk.

“Democracy is at stake in this election,” Deborah Scott, Executive Director of Georgia STAND-UP, a progressive activist group, told Yahoo News. “It’s so fitting that it’s happening right here in Georgia — a Southern state, a former slave state — and the base of it is Black women.” (Emphasis added).

Appointed Republican Senator Kelly Loeffler is defending her job against challenger Democrat Raphael Warnock. He’s the senior pastor of famed Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. That church is famous because it is where Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once preached and pastored.

Meanwhile, Republican Senator David Perdue will face off against Democrat Jon Ossoff, a 33-year-old former House candidate and fundraiser par excellence.

Both Republican candidates are relative neophytes. Perdue, a freshman Senator (2014), is up for reelection for the first time. Loeffler, a 49-year-old businesswoman, wife of the Chairman of the New York Stock Exchange, heavy-hitting GOP donor, co-owner of the WNBA’s Atlanta Dream, and with a net worth clocking in at $520 million, is the richest US Senator. She was appointed by Georgia Governor Brian Kemp just this year after long-serving Senator Johnny Isakson retired (health issues).

Stacy Abrams…a Force of Nature

Former gubernatorial candidate and state House Minority Leader Stacey Abrams has been credited with registering upwards of 800,000 Georgians to vote in this year’s recent presidential election. And, she is still on the case, raising millions of dollars to help deliver both Ossoff and Warnock into the Senate, and thereby upset the GOP’s plans to obstruct the incoming Biden administration at every turn.

DuBose Porter is the former chairman of the Georgia state Democratic Party. As to Sistah Stacey, he is quoted by Yahoo News thusly: “Stacey is the architect of how we are where we are in Georgia.”

Activist Scott chimed in on the importance/impact of Sistah Stacey with this:

“I love Stacey and I support what she’s doing, and we’re glad that she’s able to bring the attention to such an important issue,” Scott said. “So we’re excited about that, and we see the impact.”

Although they are still counting the votes in the presidential race in Georgia, at this writing, Biden maintains a 14,000-vote lead.

The race is thisclose in Georgia — so close that Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, has announced that there will be a full by-hand recount in each of the state’s 159 counties. That’s a total, to date, of 5 million votes cast. In accordance with Georgia state law, the recount must be completed by November 20.

True to Republican form, Loeffler and Perdue issued a joint statement demanding that that the Secretary of State resign, citing nonspecific “failures” and, of course, no evidence thereof, in the conduct of the election. Raffensperger defended his office’s handling of the election and has refused to resign.

The Importance of Race in This Race Cannot Be Overstated

As for the Democrats, Scott says that out-of-state support for both Warnock and Ossoff is surging:

“When we look at what’s going to happen over the next nine weeks, we know now that there are going to be a lot of people that want to come to Georgia and they want to help,” said Scott. “And the reason they want to help is they see that this is a moment in time that they can actually make a difference in their democracy and even in their volunteerism. “You have these two Senate seats that will really hold the balance of power for the Senate. And so if everything happens in Georgia, and people actually turn out, then we can actually shift some of the progressive policies that need to be in place.”

Georgians have until December 7 to register for the run-off election, and early in-person voting will begin a week later, on December 14. The run-off election will then be held on Jan. 5.

As they have done in just about every election since 2013, when the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the GOP has conducted a ceaseless master class in voting suppression nationwide. To that end, it is trying to figure out how to put its thumb on the scale in the upcoming Georgia run-off in order to disenfranchise as many Democratic voters as possible — especially black voters.

Georgia GOP May Outlaw Mail-In-Voting

Since 2018, when Georgia Republicans voter-suppressed Stacey Abrams out of the governor’s office, they have not yet figured out how to deal with her, how to stop her or her friends. Until now. They have seen and studied how important and impactful absentee voting, early voting, and vote-by-mail have been in the still ongoing presidential election. And they realize that their “traditional” means and methods of voter suppression have thereby been ineffective and nullified. Thus, the GOP-dominated legislature and governor are seriously contemplating a simpler but far more effective measure to achieve the same result: eliminate altogether early voting, absentee voting, and vote-by-mail in the state of Georgia.

No? They wouldn’t dare, you say? Even the most casual observer of “politics” over the last fifty years, particularly of Southern politics, should be able to spot the obvious “pattern” here. These people, the GOP, do not consider Democratic votes as “legal” in the same sense that, according to Republican dogma, “certain” people (brown and black people mainly) are by definition “illegal,” and therefore they should have no “legal” right to a voice in the operations of local, state or federal governance. Those voters (blacks, brown, Democrats generally) and their votes are, by their lights and by their definition, “illegal.”

It is clear as mud, then, that Republicans have known and understood for generations now that they cannot win most elections without cheating…or changing the rules in the middle of the game… or by moving the goalposts… or by compromising the refs… or…as in this case, simply refusing to allow the opposing team to even handle the ball.