Georgia's Jim Crow Lite Vote Suppression Continues Trump's War on Democracy
Before Donald Trump came along, Republican states frequently passed laws to restrict ballot access. Reporters didn’t always pay these laws much attention, and corporations never even considered anything like the retaliatory step announced by Major League Baseball, which has moved the All-Star Game from vote-suppression ground zero in Georgia.
But Trump’s crass, frequently euphemism-free style stripped away a lot of illusions. The corporate backlash against Georgia is a template for a broader response to the party’s ongoing effort to curtail the franchise.
Conservatives are furious that the latest raft of voting restrictions is being described as “vote suppression.” After all, they point out, voting remains legal. “You know what voter suppression is?” sneered Ben Shapiro. “Voter suppression is when you don’t get to vote.”
By this definition, large swaths of the Jim Crow South also did not engage in “vote suppression.” The Black voter-registration rate in the South in 1965 ranged from 6.7 percent in Mississippi to 46.8 percent in North Carolina. There was no “Black people can’t vote” law on the books because of the 15th Amendment’s requirement that “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race.” Instead, conservative white-controlled state governments had to get around the Constitution by enacting ostensibly race-neutral voting restrictions. Some of those measures were farcical (like requirements to guess the number of jelly beans in a jar), but others were real tests of education or civic knowledge that had the desired effect of winnowing out Black voters.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/georgia-s-jim-crow-lite-vote-suppression-continues-trump-s-war-on-democracy/ar-BB1ffrva?li=BB141NW3&ocid=DELLDHP
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