Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

In Georgia, the most insidious suppression may be weakening the will to vote

Atlanta voters

Voters cast their ballots in Atlanta for the 2020 general election.

Jessica McGowan/Getty Image

Dzieduszycka-Suinat is the president of the U.S. Vote Foundation, a nonprofit that works to ensure that all citizens become voters.


Outrage over the new Georgia law is warranted. It's an overt suppression scheme — aimed at Black voters, specifically, and overall turnout, generally. But before we give much more oxygen to the measure's red herring, criminalizing distribution of food and water to people in long lines at the polls, let's highlight its dangerous core: allowing elected officials to manipulate election outcomes.

An authoritarian handbook couldn't have delivered a more effective strategy.

Under the law, ostensibly enacted in response to a "significant lack of confidence in Georgia election systems," the secretary of state is no longer chair of the State Election Board; that statewide elected official will be replaced by a "chairperson elected by the General Assembly." The board issues regulations governing elections, investigates fraud allegations and — significantly — it sets the rules on "what constitutes a vote and what will be counted as a vote."


Courtesy U.S. Vote Foundation


The Republican-majority legislature was no doubt inspired to write this section by Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger's failure to reconsider the 2020 presidential election's outcome — despite intense pressure to do so from a fellow Republican, the defeated President Donald Trump.

Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter

But there's more. Going forward, the state board may "suspend county or municipal superintendents" and appoint new people to temporarily act in their places.

Counties in Georgia, as in most states, hold great power; they register voters, maintain voter lists, conduct all of the ballot casting and then certify elections. Appoint someone who is too biased to take charge of a county election office, and suddenly the fox is guarding the hen house. Registration purges become heavy-handed, applications are put "on hold," recounts take place on shaky ground. And all these actions affect outcomes, potentially shifting the result of a close race.

Supporters of Georgia's new statute may say: "Look, don't worry, because the law restricts the state board from suspending any more than four county supervisors." But in the last election, seven of the 10 counties that swung the most heavily toward the Democrats in the entire country (compared with 2016) were in metro Atlanta. And President Biden carried five of them on his way to turning the state blue on the national map for the first time since 1992.

So, permission to control the elections in a majority of the state's pivotal counties means the GOP-dominated board will be close to controlling the whole election. The choice of four counties was no accident.

Indeed, no provision in the Georgia law looks to be more harmful to Black voters, and their historic 2020 turnout, or more fatal to democracy's survival.

Voter suppression in Georgia already relies on a bevy of tools to shape outcomes before they occur: strict ID laws, voter registration purges, shuttered polling places, partisan gerrymandering and unrestricted campaign contributions, to name only the most prominent.

If those tactics fail and the results in the ballot boxes still don't favor the suppressors — in Georgia or anywhere else — they have some back-end solutions, too: baseless lawsuits challenging the outcomes, calls from the powerful pressuring for "do-overs" and, as of Jan. 6, even a violent insurrection in the very seat of government.

After the last election, the evidence-free lawsuits didn't work, the calls for outcome flips went unheeded and the Capitol remained intact. So, when all else failed, it was time for the losers to start rewriting the rules.

This latest tactic is especially powerful. Whereas strict ID requirements — and other blatantly racist measures — often backfire by driving record numbers to the polls, some other laws force voters to question whether the process itself is legitimate and so whether they should bother participating.

Why show up when the system is stacked against you? When your ballot could get tossed on a political whim? Cultivating that skepticism and subsequent apathy is exactly what Georgian lawmakers had in mind. A citizen who feels powerless is a non-voter. And that's the most effective way to suppress the vote.

Tactics like this are used the world over. Like the Georgia lawmakers asserting "election integrity" concerns as their motive, military commanders in Myanmar asserted "voter fraud" as their justification in February for overturning an election and taking power.

To be sure, that democracy was relatively fresh and the people had already lived through military rule. But when there are breakdowns like the one in Georgia — when parts of the country become "laboratories of authoritarianism" rather than experiments in democracy — they potentially create a domino effect across the land.

Our centuries-old form of government will not necessarily die in one fell swoop. Its demise, like going broke, could happen slowly, slowly, then all at once.

But we can avoid a dangerous trajectory by passing a strong counter-measure: legislation to revive the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which for almost half a century helped protect Black voters and other minority citizens from discriminatory election laws. A bill in Congress would update the system, struck down by the Supreme Court in 2013 as unconstitutionally outdated, requiring places with discriminatory voting rules to get federal permission before altering any election regulations.

Enacting the measure would mean states and counties would be judged not by their historic sins but by their current actions and intentions. Some states have shown they need the help.

Federal legislative fixes are essential, but they won't solve the problem alone. Lawmakers must be reminded that tables turn, and manipulative rules like those now on the books in Georgia can come back to haunt them.

And when that happens, parties don't just implode. Democracy as a whole self-combusts.

Read More

"Voter Here" sign outside of a polling location.

"Voter Here" sign outside of a polling location.

Getty Images, Grace Cary

Stopping the Descent Toward Banana Republic Elections

President Trump’s election-related executive order begins by pointing out practices in Canada, Sweden, Brazil, and elsewhere that outperform the U.S. But it is Trump’s order itself that really demonstrates how far we’ve fallen behind. In none of the countries mentioned, or any other major democracy in the world, would the head of government change election rules by decree, as Trump has tried to do.

Trump is the leader of a political party that will fight for control of Congress in 2026, an election sure to be close, and important to his presidency. The leader of one side in such a competition has no business unilaterally changing its rules—that’s why executive decrees changing elections only happen in tinpot dictatorships, not democracies.

Keep ReadingShow less
hundred dollar bills.
Getty Images, boonchai wedmakawand

Congress Bill Spotlight: Donald J. Trump $250 Bill Act

The Fulcrum introduces Congress Bill Spotlight, a weekly report by Jesse Rifkin, focusing on the noteworthy legislation of the thousands introduced in Congress. Rifkin has written about Congress for years, and now he's dissecting the most interesting bills you need to know about but that often don't get the right news coverage.

Trump reportedly tips his Mar-a-Lago groundskeepers with $100 bills. What if his own face appeared on them?

Keep ReadingShow less
Introducing The Expand Democracy 5

Introducing The Expand Democracy 5

In March, Rob Richie and Eveline Dowling launched a new Expand Democracy publication: The Expand Democracy 5. Each week they lift up five stories connected to their core belief: if democracy is not expanding, it is shrinking. They’re on the lookout for informative articles and timely news associated with a pro-democracy proposal that they believe warrants greater public awareness, often with links allowing readers to go deeper and connect with those advancing the idea.

In keeping with The Fulcrum’s mission to share ideas that help to repair our democracy and make it live and work in our everyday lives, we intend to publish The Expand Democracy 5 in The Fulcrum each Friday, beginning today.

Keep ReadingShow less
Defining the Democracy Movement: Karissa Raskin
- YouTube

Defining the Democracy Movement: Karissa Raskin

The Fulcrum presents The Path Forward: Defining the Democracy Reform Movement. Scott Warren's interview series engages diverse thought leaders to elevate the conversation about building a thriving and healthy democratic republic that fulfills its potential as a national social and political game-changer. This initiative is the start of focused collaborations and dialogue led by The Bridge Alliance and The Fulcrum teams to help the movement find a path forward.

Karissa Raskin is the new CEO of the Listen First Project, a coalition of over 500 nationwide organizations dedicated to bridging differences. The coalition aims to increase social cohesion across American society and serves as a way for bridging organizations to compare notes, share resources, and collaborate broadly. Karissa, who is based in Jacksonville, served as the Director of Coalition Engagement for a number of years before assuming the CEO role this February.

Keep ReadingShow less