Still, voters were not deterred.
During the general election, voters set a record for the number of early votes cast in a Georgia by-election, and on Monday and again on Tuesday, they set records for voting a day early in a runoff election in Georgia. It’s interesting to note that an estimated 35 percent of early votes to date have come from African Americans, slightly more than their percentage of Georgia’s population.
This is a testament to the resolve of those voters, as they were the ones targeted in Georgia’s latest round of voter suppression with “uncanny precision,” as Brennan Center for Justice president Michael Waldman, put it last year. Waldman wrote that Governor Brian Kemp “signed his voter suppression bill in front of a painting of a plantation where more than 100 black people had been enslaved. The symbolism, unnerving and gruesome, is almost too appropriate.”
Those who defend voter suppression point to these numbers as proof that their critics are simply being hyperbolic and creating a problem that doesn’t exist. But that’s the opposite of the truth as far as I can tell. From my perspective, voters are simply responding defiantly to the attempts to suppress.
And yet that resistance may not be enough to overcome all the obstacles that stand in the way of voters. While those record daily numbers are encouraging, they are in part the result of a new Republican electoral law that roughly halved the number of days for early voting. Even with the extraordinary turnout, this year’s early vote is unlikely to match last year’s between Warnock and Republican incumbent Kelly Loeffler.
Moreover, with Walker, the Republicans have drafted a particularly offensive candidate, a man unfit for election, a walking caricature of black ability and excellence, as if black candidates are interchangeable regardless of performance and ability.
The entire time I waited in line, I kept thinking about how the wait would have been impossible for someone struggling with childcare or elder care, or someone whose job — or jobs — didn’t have such a long break in the middle. allows of the day.
I also voted on an unseasonably warm day. What about those whose only opportunity to vote is a day when it rains or is cold? The queue at my polling place was outside 90 percent of the time I waited.