Georgia Updates Its Voter Suppression Efforts: ‘No-Car No-Vote’
By: Herbert Dyer
Tags: White Supremacy, Politics, Race, Donald Trump, Georgia

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger speaks during a news conference on Wednesday, Nov. 11, 2020, in Atlanta. Georgia election officials have announced an audit of presidential election results that will trigger a full hand recount. Photo Credit: Brynn Anderson / AP

Now comes the astonishing news that the Georgia State Board of Elections will allow county election supervisors to stop and/or disregard would-be (new) registered voters who do not have a car registered in the state.

This is an obvious and direct effort to not merely suppress but to eliminate altogether the voting power of low-income, “urban” (read: black) voters and, of course, elderly people, disabled people, and students — anybody and everybody who may or traditionally has voted for Democrats. This new “guidance” has been promulgated just in time for the January 5 run-off election for Georgia’s two US Senate seats. That election carries more potential and possibility than perhaps even the late presidential election because it will very likely decide the makeup of the Senate. This election will determine whether this nation-state will finally join the rest of the world in the now nearly twenty-one-year-old 21st Century as a mature, forward-looking, people-centered country or remain mired in its tired, tried and true history of settler-colonialism, slavery, imperialism, white supremacist ideology, dogma and practice.

Specifically, Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger issued a notice last Sunday afternoon calling for an “emergency” change of the rules regulating elections.

Greg Palast is this nation’s premier anti-voter suppression advocate. I recently profiled Palast here. Following the Secretary of State’s pronouncement, the Palast Investigations Fund team participated in a Zoom meeting which included the president of the Georgia NAACP and Helen Butler, head of the Georgia Coalition for a Peoples Agenda.

The Board argued that it was not constitutionally required to actually “vote” on the rule change because the issuance of a simple “guidance” would suffice. Interestingly, however, such “guidance,” they claimed, somehow carried the same weight and power as an actual vote to block registrations.

Barbara Arnwine is a Columbia University law professor who has weighed in on this matter, saying that the new “no-car no-vote” “emergency” regulation was not only unconstitutional, but is also “is a clear violation of the NVRA” (National Voter Registration Act). Arnwine is also the founder of the Transformative Justice Coalition. She also said of the rule change that its obvious and sole purpose is to subvert the NVRA’s clear and strict prohibition against any rule changes within ninety days of an election. Therefore, she said, “It’s in substance a change of rules.” But, by calling this rule change a mere “guidance,” the Board gets around NVRA. Neat.

Still, as per the Secretary of State, this “emergency” non-rule guidance is meant to curtail voter fraud by people whom he and now frightened Republicans falsely claim are streaming into Georgia specifically, and only, to vote for Democrats in the run-off.

During the Zoom meeting, Palast Investigative Fund Assistant Producer Terry Manpearl asked the Sectary of State perhaps the most pertinent question of the day: Had even a single, solitary case of a non-Georgian voting been discovered in the late election? “And if so, have you arrested them?” The Secretary of State and his office ignored Manpearl’s question.

It is not the state itself which can stop Georgians from voting because they don’t have a car. Rather, it is the local (county) registrar who is now empowered to first “challenge” and then delay validation of a voter’s registration until a hearing is held wherein the challenged voter must show proof of residence — including his or her vehicle’s registration papers.

As the Palast organization interprets it, this new “guidance” will effectively eliminate hundreds of thousands of Georgians already registered and particularly new would-be registrants from voting, especially since we are now firmly in the midst of the holiday season and with Covid-19 once again rampaging across the land. The hearing and decision processes can and will be slow-walked by Georgia’s county registrars, most of whom are Republicans, to the point that the clock will run out and disenfranchise anyone who does not own a Georgia-registered car.

The registration deadline is December 7.

Greg Palast wants all Georgians to know that if they are “challenged, blocked or impeded in any way to let us know.”

The GOP Will Never Give Up on Stopping Black People from Voting

As I have argued earlier, today’s Republican Party simply does not believe that black people should be allowed to vote. There is a long and sordid history of ante- and post-bellum white supremacist Southern “Democrats,” then early to mid-20th Century Jim Crow-loving “Dixiecrat Democrats,” and finally, after the political “switch” was made following passage of the Civil Rights Acts of 1960s…of re-branded “Republican” white supremacists doing everything they could think of — from “literacy tests” to lynching — to keep black people from voting.

In Georgia, for example, apparently the Republican-controlled state has finally given up on the idea of outlawing mail-in and absentee ballots, not because such a move is discriminatory, undemocratic, just plain wrong, unethical or immoral, but because there is simply not enough time to pass such a law. And so, instead, they have reached in and pulled out a new trick from their bottomless bag of voter suppression tricks….requiring everybody to have a car in order to vote.

A Word About Raffensperger, Secretary of State

Recall that after the presidential election earlier this month, this is the very same Secretary of State who garnered praise and accolades for not only ignoring but defying Donald Trump’s and the GOP’s entreaties to somehow “rig” the Georgia presidential election in Trump’s favor. But Raffensperger demurred and very publicly declared that even though he was a Republican and had, in fact, voted for Donald Trump, his job as the state’s top election official required, demanded, that he follow the law and count all “legal” votes.

Raffensperger was roundly excoriated by Trump and his sycophantic followers. Indeed, Raffensberger reported death threats against him and his family.

(Incidentally, the continual use of the term “legal votes” by Republican apparatchiks is a deliberate, calculated, and conscious attempt to imply or suggest or hint that there are also undiscovered, unseen, mysterious, and illicit — illegal — votes which have contaminated the election process and thus the election results. The term is meant to spread doubt about the whole thing so that the results may be thrown out, allowing — mandating — that Donald Trump re-assume his rightful place as “the Chosen One.” (“Illegal votes” and voters rhetoric also lays the groundwork for the undermining and deligitimizing of President-Elect Biden’s upcoming administration. Get ready for a four-year GOP whine, obstruction of, complaint and organizing against every single move that a President (and particularly a Vice President Harris) makes or even contemplates.)

However, amazingly, in this latest stance, in this Georgia Senate run-off contest, now that the balance of power in this nation-state actually hinges precariously on the not-so-peachy “Peach State’s” decision, a decision which could shift national policy and power to the Democrats should both Democratic candidates win Georgia’s January 5 run-off election, Raffensperger has reverted back true to form — Party and Whiteness First, America Last.