Long lines are the fault of local jurisdictions, often run by Democrats.
Long lines are the fault of local jurisdictions, often run by Democrats.
I t’s been a bad couple of days for the idea that the country is experiencing a wave of racist voter suppression.
President Biden’s Atlanta speech is now widely acknowledged to have spectacularly backfired, and Representative James Clyburn went on a couple of Sunday shows yesterday to try to buttress the president’s case but could only muster farcical non-evidence.
“I want to know what’s going to happen in 2022,” he said on Meet the Press, “when someone is standing in that line and needs a drink of water. When you’ve got these six- or seven-hour waits in line in black communities, and 20 minutes in white communities.”
Asked by Jake Tapper on CNN’s State of the Union whether Biden’s rhetoric in Atlanta went too far, Clyburn responded, “Is it going too far to criminalize giving somebody a bottle of water standing in line trying to vote, standing in line for four or five hours?”
Long lines have gotten a lot of attention in Georgia, ground zero for the voting debate, but what Clyburn and his allies will never mention is that localities administer elections in Georgia, and the ones that have been most associated with out-of-control lines are run by Democrats.
So, here is an elder statesman of the Democratic Party — who cares deeply about voting issues and repeatedly insists that “history” will judge opponents of the Democratic bills — and apparently the most compelling fact he can offer in support of his argument is a complete canard, either because he’s poorly informed or dishonest or a little of both.
What he is in effect saying is that the Senate filibuster must be eliminated and elections rules nationalized in an unprecedented way because local-level Democrats can’t get their act together and maintain enough precincts to keep voting lines in predominantly black neighborhoods at a manageable level.
The food-and-drink charge is equally ridiculous. To prevent electioneering among people standing in the line, the new Georgia law forbids giving out food and drink, or other gifts, within 150 feet of a polling place or 25 feet of a line. There’s no need for anyone to starve or drop dead of dehydration. As long as the circumscribed distances are honored, anyone can provide food and drink — in fact, set up a tailgate party or arrange for cross-country deliveries from the French Laundry.
As for the lines themselves, a big report by ProPublica in October 2020 found that African-American voter registration had surged in jurisdictions that were at the same time scaling back the number of precincts, creating a mismatch. The problem was particularly pronounced in metro Atlanta, areas dominated by Democrats.
Neither part of this equation fits the voter-suppression narrative, by the way. Why was there a surge in non-white voter registration in a state experiencing Jim Crow 2.0, and why were Democratic-run jurisdictions keeping Democrats from the polls?
At least reality occasionally intrudes. The chair of the state Democratic Party told ProPublica that the party added counties to its (failed) lawsuit against state officials over long lines because “we want to make sure that we’re getting this right.”
It’d be nice if she could get word about the role of the counties to James Clyburn and the president of the United States.
The leading counties named in that suit — Fulton, DeKalb, Cobb, and Gwinnett — all include Atlanta or are in the Atlanta suburbs, and all either have majority Democratic boards of commissioners or no Republican commissioners at all.
Once the responsibility of counties is acknowledged, the case against the state becomes that its vote suppression consists in not doing more to stop Democratic localities from suppressing their own voters. As ProPublica says of now-Governor Brian Kemp’s tenure as secretary of state, he “took a laissez-faire attitude toward county-run election practices.”
Why do counties cut down on polling places? The Atlanta Journal-Constitution ran an extensive report on changes in polling places from 2012 and 2018, and found counties cut precincts for budgetary reasons or because they were in run-down buildings not accessible to the disabled. According to ProPublica, Atlanta-area counties have axed precincts to save money, or because municipalities have been annexed or newly established, or in response to changing voting behavior.
These may have been the wrong decisions, but none of them were made to disenfranchise people.
As it happens, Republican secretary of state Brad Raffensperger has indeed been focused on long lines. He proposed legislation to address the problem in 2020, but Democrats objected. The election law that passed last year takes on the issue by forcing counties with chronically long lines to reduce the size of the relevant precincts, or add new equipment or workers.
Yes, the law that is portrayed as hateful voter suppression makes a good-faith effort to alleviate the lines that Clyburn and others so often cite as evidence of all that is wrong with our electoral system.
If Clyburn earnestly believes that long lines are the new Jim Crow, he should hope the Georgia law succeeds in holding offending Democratic-run counties to account — and stop misleading the public about what’s happening in Georgia, and why.