The activist started Jim Crow 2.0 in Georgia.
The activist started Jim Crow 2.0 in Georgia.
B y the time the reader of the Stacey Abrams book Our Time Is Now gets to page 89, he is numb with the relentless contentions that any effort to make the Georgia elections system more secure or economical, any bureaucratic mistake or inefficiency, is evidence of a dastardly scheme to suppress the vote.
Then, he is jolted alert again when Abrams writes how while in the state legislature in 2011, she co-sponsored legislation to slash the early-voting period in Georgia in half — and succeeded.
Yes, by her own logic, Stacey Abrams suppressed the vote in Georgia and did it more blatantly than anything in the state’s new voting law, which will actually extend early-voting hours in many places.
Anyone calling the Georgia law “Jim Crow 2.0” at the very least has his enumeration wrong. The Stacey Abrams–supported bill in 2011 should, on these terms, get the 2.0 designation, rendering the new law Jim Crow 3.0.
The Abrams legislation cut the days for early voting from 45 all the way down to 21.
Why? Abrams says that early voting could be “a cost-prohibitive burden” to local governments. Smaller jurisdictions, she writes, complained they’d have to cut back in other budgetary areas to maintain the longer period of early voting, and the costs of keeping a facility open were the same whether many people were using it or not.
All undoubtedly true, but this didn’t stop her and her allies from attributing the worst possible motives to localities that closed down polling places on the basis of exactly this kind of reasoning — it didn’t make fiscal sense for cash-strapped jurisdictions to continue to operate under-utilized polling places. In her book, she portrays such decisions as a return to the bad old days enabled by the Supreme Court’s Shelby decision that ended federal review of changes in the electoral system in Georgia and elsewhere.
Another Abrams defense of her reduction in the early-voting period is that there was still plenty of time to vote, in fact “three solid weeks of early access.”
But Abrams and her allies reject this defense of the new Georgia law. That it has reduced the period for requesting an absentee ballot — and not down to three weeks, it is worth noting, but to three months — is one reason that it is “Jim Crow-adjacent,” according to Jamelle Bouie of the New York Times.
Georgia, he writes, “has now cut by more than half the period during which absentee voters can request a ballot, to less than three months from six months.”
And it doesn’t matter that this change isn’t going to stop anyone from voting absentee. No, per Bouie, it’s the trajectory that counts — “Jim Crow was not an overnight phenomenon.”
By this reasoning, Georgia’s long descent toward a new Jim Crow hellscape began about ten years ago with legislation strongly supported by none other than . . . Stacey Abrams.