The 2019 All-Star game was held in Ohio, which was then under attack from Hillary Clinton over its voting laws.
The last time Major League Baseball held its All-Star Game, it was played in a state accused by Democrats and activists of disenfranchising voters and intentionally making voting difficult.
It was played in a state where absentee voters must have ID to vote by mail, where votes cast in the wrong precinct aren’t counted, and where there are limits on ballot drop-box locations.
The 2019 All-Star Game in Cleveland was the second “Midsummer Classic” played in Ohio since Rob Manfred was named the league’s commissioner in 2014. The first was in Cincinnati in 2015.
In the years leading up to the 2019 game, Democrats, including Hillary Clinton, and voting-rights groups filed several lawsuits and were making some of the same complaints about Ohio’s election laws that they’re now making about Georgia’s: Ohio’s voter-ID restrictions were too onerous, its early-voting restrictions weren’t fair, and its method for verifying absentee ballots and purging voter rolls disenfranchised voters, particularly low-income voters and minorities.
Republicans in Ohio deemed the complaints frivolous, politically motivated publicity gambits. For their part, MLB leaders, including Manfred, addressed the issue by saying . . . nothing.
Last week, Manfred pulled the 2021 All-Star Game out of Georgia in response to the state’s new election-security law, calling the decision “the best way to demonstrate our values as a sport.” The All-Star Game will now be played in Denver, Colo. But there were no protests in 2019 — and no talk by MLB of relocating the game — because of Ohio’s similar election laws.
In fact, MLB’s steadfast commitment to voting rights and its interest in state election laws seem to be mostly new, coming only after President Joe Biden hyperbolically called the Georgia law “Jim Crow on steroids,” lied about its provisions, and then, during an interview with ESPN, backed pulling the All-Star Game from Atlanta as a form of protest.
MLB — which played a game in Communist Cuba in 2016 and has ongoing business with Communist China — has not cited any specific provision of the Georgia law it disagrees with. Manfred has only said that MLB “fundamentally supports voting rights for all Americans and opposes restrictions to the ballot box.”
But in the nearly two months that Georgia lawmakers were crafting and debating the election law, MLB leaders did not engage with them at all, and did not express any concerns about the law before Governor Brian Kemp signed it on March 25, state leaders told National Review.
“I do not recall any interaction with Major League Baseball for sure, and I do not recall any interactions with anybody representing the [Atlanta] Braves organization the whole time that we were debating and working through the bill,” said Barry Fleming, the state representative who sponsored the House version of the election bill.
MLB also didn’t engage with Kemp before he signed the law. He told Fox News he had only a brief conversation with Manfred before Manfred pulled the All-Star Game from Atlanta.
“I talked to the commissioner, offered to explain anything he wanted in the bill, because I heard they were getting pressured. He thanked me for that,” Kemp said. “And then I got a call saying they had moved the game. No dialogue whatsoever, which is just disappointing.”
MLB did not respond to requests for comment from National Review — submitted over the phone, and via email and Twitter.
MLB Caused Harm ‘Without Any Warning’
Fleming said he met with several prominent business leaders in February and March to discuss the election bill and to make changes. But MLB officials did not reach out to him, he said, and he doesn’t believe they reached out to any of his colleagues in the legislature either.
Between the House and Senate, he said, there were about 20 hearings on the proposal when MLB officials also could have weighed in. If MLB was dissatisfied with the legislation, “we certainly could and would have made changes along the way,” Fleming said.
“That’s just part of the legislative process, you come, you participate, you give your input, and quite often changes and adjustments are made,” Fleming said.
He said the first time he heard MLB was unhappy with the law was “when I heard they were moving the game out of Atlanta.”
“So, without any warning, they’ve done a good deal of harm to the people that live and work . . . around the All-Star Game,” Fleming said. “Whether they intended to harm small businesses and people who were depending on jobs and our economy, they did.”
In a press conference last weekend, Kemp also said he would have been happy to discuss the issue with MLB, but “no one has brought up any specifics in the bill.”
Chip Lake, a Republican strategist in Georgia said it appears MLB simply caved to cancel-culture pressure after the bill was signed. “I just don’t understand how pitting half of your customers or fans against the other half is good for business or sports,” Lake said. “I just can’t fathom that they thought that was a good idea, but that’s where we’re at.”
CNN anchor Jake Tapper reported on Twitter Wednesday that MLB made the decision to move the All-Star Game to avoid a situation where individual players were boycotting the game, and where players were being continuously asked about the controversy.
2/ MLB officials made the decision because if they didn’t then the decision would be left to individual players, individual All-Stars, some of whom no doubt would have individually boycotted the game themselves.
In short: There was no way to avoid this becoming political.
— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) April 7, 2021
In his Fox interview, Kemp called it “almost comical” that MLB was pulling the game out of Atlanta, which has a larger percentage of black residents than Denver. He also said he received little pushback from corporate America until “they got pressured by the cancel culture.”
“And I’ll tell you who’s getting screwed,” he said. “It’s the little guy. It’s the little guy that’s working in Georgia, either working in these bars, taverns, hotels, that now are not going to have guests because the All-Star Game, and Major League Baseball made the decision to pull the game out of here, because they don’t have enough backbone to stand up to these people.”
Comparing Election Laws in Georgia, Ohio, and Florida
Not only did MLB fail to object to Georgia’s voting law during its formation, according to the state officials involved, there’s little evidence the league has ever expressed interest in the intricacies of the voting regimes in the various states it does business.
A review of the election laws in Georgia, Ohio, and Florida, which hosted the 2017 MLB All-Star Game in Miami, found that the three states have slightly different ways of addressing many of the same issues — things like voter-ID requirements, how to verify absentee ballots, and limits on electioneering outside polling locations — that have animated Democratic activists and garnered media attention.
Some provisions in Ohio’s and Florida’s laws are actually stricter than Georgia’s, even though critics at the moment are singling out Georgia’s provisions as evidence of voter suppression.
All three states require identification to vote in person, though there are minor differences in which IDs the states will accept. Georgia, for example, allows voters to identify themselves with an expired driver’s license and ID cards issued by any state. Those are not considered acceptable forms of ID in Ohio or Florida.
Some parts of Georgia’s law are stricter than Ohio’s and Florida’s. For instance, Georgia rolled back the number of days voters can request absentee ballots from 180 days to eleven weeks, which is shorter than in Ohio or Florida. It also barred elections officials from mailing out unsolicited absentee-ballot applications to voters, which is permitted in Ohio and Florida.
But some provisions in Georgia’s law are less strict than similar provisions in Ohio and Florida.
Georgia has 17 days of mandated early voting. That’s more than Florida, which requires only a minimum of seven early voting days and up to 13. Ohio mandates 22 days of early voting, starting 28 days before an election, according to the state’s election laws.
Georgia has been criticized for a new requirement that absentee voters include their driver’s license or state ID number, or the last four digits of their Social Security number, on their ballot. Previously, voters just signed their ballot, and that was matched to a signature on file. The New York Times said the new ID requirement “is virtually certain to limit access to absentee voting.”
But Ohio’s law is stricter than Georgia’s. According to Ohio statutes, voters are not only required to include a driver’s license or state ID number on their absentee ballots, but they also are required to sign their ballot so it can be matched to a signature on file.
For the first time, because of the COVID-19 pandemic that led to an increase in absentee voting, Georgia’s new law authorizes ballot drop boxes in the state. Critics don’t like that it limits the number of boxes based on population, and that there will likely be fewer boxes available to voters in 2022 than there were in last year’s election. But Ohio also has restrictions on drop boxes, limiting them to one early-voting center in each county.
Georgia’s law also has been dinged for limiting the use of mobile voting buses — think voting locations on wheels — to emergencies only, and for only counting provisional ballots cast in the wrong precinct if they’re cast after 5 p.m. on Election Day. But neither Florida nor Ohio even has a mobile voting bus, and neither state counts provisional ballots cast at the wrong precinct at all, regardless of when they were cast, according to elections officials.
No provision of Georgia’s law has been more misunderstood or misrepresented than it’s provision prohibiting people from giving gifts — including food or water — to voters waiting in line at a polling location. The provision is meant to curb what is known as “line warming.”
Georgia and Florida both prohibit electioneering within 150 feet of a polling location, while Ohio prohibits it within 100 feet. While Ohio’s and Florida’s laws don’t specifically mention a prohibition on handing out food and drinks to voters, they essentially do the same thing as Georgia’s, according to elections officials in both states.
“The only people allowed in that (voting) zone are voters and poll workers,” said Dave Carpenter, an elections officer in Collier County, Fla. “The only thing that got this thing rolling was the mention of, well, you won’t give them water in line. That isn’t what it’s about, because the water is never just the water. It’s water with my picture on it.”