Major League Baseball has moved the league’s all-star game from Georgia to Colorado to protest a restrictive voting law passed by the Republican-dominated Georgia state legislature. Coca Cola and Delta airlines, both headquartered in Georgia, have also criticized the law. Some people – including President Biden – are happy companies are speaking up. Other people are pretty offended and are calling for boycotts of baseball and Coke. Americans cancelling baseball??? And COKE??!? That’s a pretty big deal. But then again, so is the law.
The law makes a few changes that make voting easier, for example requiring early voting on at least two weekend dates and providing at least one ballot drop box in every county. But it includes a number of provisions that would make voting harder: voters must have a reason to receive an absentee ballot and county officials are forbidden from sending mail-in ballots to all voters. The window for requesting an absentee ballot is shorter, the number of ballot drop boxes a county can provide is capped, and somewhat bizarrely, there is now a ban on delivering food and water to voters waiting in line.
These provisions are likely to reduce turnout. Evidence indicates that universal mail-in ballots – which are now explicitly banned in Georgia – increase the number of people who cast a vote. Turnout is also lower where voters have had a bad experience waiting in long lines in prior elections. A law that makes waiting in line extra miserable by ensuring that voters also can’t get access to food or water while they’re waiting increases the chance that they will walk away not only from that election, but also later ones.
More importantly, the law also gives an electoral advantage to one party and it happens to be the party that wrote the bill. When turnout is low — including for completely innocuous reasons like bad weather — it often (though not always) advantages Republicans. This is because some people face more obstacles to voting than others, and any additional obstacles can be the final straw that keeps them home. Citizens who struggle to get to the polls are disproportionately younger, lower income, and non-white. In general, laws that place restrictions on voting disproportionately reduce turnout among these groups….and members of these groups more likely to be Democrats.
Additionally, the particular rules the Georgia legislature included in the bill systematically and specifically make voting harder for urban voters and voters of color (read: Democratic voters). The news rules about ballot drop boxes, for example, would ensure there is now a box in rural counties that didn’t have one before, but would reduce the number of drop boxes available in cities. The ban on food and water only matters for people waiting in long lines, but long lines occur disproportionately in urban areas and in areas where most voters are not white.
Given the likely effects, is there there some other legitimate purpose that these laws could serve? Was the Georgia state legislature really trying to pass a law for the purpose of discouraging turnout and advantaging themselves? Unfortunately, it seems that way. Voting restrictions like the ones in the law are typically justified in terms of preventing voter fraud. But there is not any evidence of meaningful fraud in US elections. If people were impersonating others or casting fake ballots in large numbers, we would be able to detect it in existing, public turnout records. Nevertheless, despite a lot of effort by a lot of people trying find voter fraud, no one has been able to find much.
Ballot harvesting, where people “help” others fill out their ballots at home or even collect blank ballots and them out on voters’ behalf is easier with mail ballots, but it is also hard to do at large scale without eventually getting turned in by voters who would really prefer to fill out their own ballots, thanks. Even with the extensive mail-in voting of the 2020 election, arrests for fraud involving more than a ballot or two have remained exceedingly rare. Preventing fraud, while a reasonable goal in theory, is not necessary in practice. Any additional fraudulent votes the Georgia law might prevent would almost certainly be outweighed by the number of non-fraudulent votes it would also prevent.
In fairness, lots of countries have laws like the one in Georgia….but we generally don’t classify those countries as democracies. In another country, passage of a law like this would alarm the international community, reduce a country’s democracy score, and likely be classified as a “democratic rollback“. Imagine if you learned that, say, Cambodia was forcing people in opposition districts to wait in long lines with no access to food or water just to cast a ballot. Or if the Ugandan legislature reduced the number of places to drop a ballot, but only in regions of the country where people were likely to vote against them. You would likely think that was both undemocratic and a fairly easy ploy to see through. And you would be correct. Even if you support the Republicans and would prefer they win elections, it is important to recognize that this particular method of winning is not compatible with democracy.
Wait! We can explain! 