The GOP's Race To The Bottom, Con't

If Republicans can't assure permanent election control by state legislature fiat, they can always fall back on good ol' voter suppression in counties with large percentages of Black and brown voters, like Georgia's Lincoln County, population 7,600 with more than a quarter being Black folk.

Lincoln County is trying to close all but one polling place for next year’s elections, a move opposed by voting and civil rights groups.

Relocating voters from the county’s seven precincts to a single location will make voting “easier and more accessible” and eliminate the need to transport voting equipment and staff the remaining sites, according to a news release. Community members disagreed.

“Lincoln County is a very rural county. Some people live as far as 23 miles from the city of Lincolnton,” said Denise Freeman, an activist and former Lincoln County school board member. “This is not about convenience for the citizens. This is about control. This is about the good old boys wanting to do what they’ve always done, which is power and control.”

The move was made possible after the Georgia General Assembly passed legislation earlier this year disbanding the Lincoln County Board of Elections. The chief sponsor of Senate bills 282 and 283 was Sen. Lee Anderson, R-Grovetown, whose district includes Lincoln County. The newly-appointed board agreed to move forward with the “consolidation” plan and was expected to vote on it last week, but appeared to lack a quorum, several said.

Multiple public interest groups including the Georgia Coalition for the People’s Agenda, Common Cause Georgia, the Southern Poverty Law Center and Augusta’s Interfaith Coalition are taking a stand against the effort.

Aunna Dennis, executive director for Common Cause Georgia, said the move is an extension of Senate Bill 202, which tightened restrictions on voting and gave the state the authority to take over elections boards.

“They’re trying to do this undercover precinct consolidation, so we’re going to go ahead with the canvassing drive,” Dennis said. Obtaining signatures from roughly 20% of the population of a single precinct would appear to have the effect of blocking the move, at least temporarily.

Dennis attributed the Lincoln County effort to a larger push across rural Georgia.

“I think there are bad actors who are wanting to pilot precinct consolidations and takeovers of elections boards in smaller counties,” she said.

With multiple voting changes from Senate Bill 202 already underway, adding the precinct closures in a county that lacks a public transportation budget – and attempting to pass them over the holiday season – is too much, Dennis said.

“There’s no real justification for something this drastic,” she said. “This is something that is trying to be steamrolled outside the public eye.”

 

This is exactly what I said would happen after Georgia's "election integrity" bills became law: entire county election boards purged of Black election workers, replaced with white Republican appointees, and voting precincts removed from Black neighborhoods entirely. 

This is also exactly the kind of racist voter suppression nonsense that the Voting Rights Act preclearance measures were supposed to stop, but that was gutted by the Roberts Court years ago and will never be fixed.

So now, Black voters will have to drive 20+ miles to vote, and it will be their fault if they don't "want to take responsibility to vote" when it will take them hours to do so.

It's the same tune across the country. Republicans gain and keep power with intensive gerrymandering, voter suppression, and spreading the Big Lie, and outright stealing elections.