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SPLC puts $30 million toward registering voters of color
Jun 17 2020
The Southern Poverty Law Center is ponying up $30 million to help community organizations further their voter registration efforts.
The "Vote Your Voice" campaign, announced Tuesday, focuses on increasing registration and mobilization of voters of color in five states: Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana and Mississippi.
Voting registration efforts across the country have taken a hit because of the coronavirus. Physical distancing and state lockdowns have made it difficult for organizers to do many of the usual voter registration pushes that take place during a presidential election year.
<p>The SPLC, in partnership with the Community Foundation of Greater Atlanta, is providing resources to grassroots organizations that help break down barriers for voters of color, in hopes of combating some of the mounting pressures that the pandemic is causing for community organizers.</p><p>"The COVID-19 pandemic has and will continue to have a disproportionate impact on democratic participation for communities of color who have been harmed most deeply by the health and economic crisis and who will encounter greater barriers to voter participation given the new risks of voting in person on Election Day," <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/news/2020/06/16/splc-invest-30-million-nonpartisan-voter-outreach" target="_blank">wrote SPLC President and Chief Executive Office Margaret Huang</a>.</p><p>The pandemic is an additional layer of complication for voters, compounding what Huang says is a "resurgence of state-sponsored voter suppression that is targeting communities of color." </p><p>In the five states where the initiative focuses, <a href="https://thefulcrum.us/voting/poll-closings-since-preclearance-voided" target="_self">more than 500 polling sites have been closed</a> since the Supreme Court's 2013 <a href="https://thefulcrum.us/shelby-county-v-holder" target="_self">Shelby v. Holder</a> decision voided the preclearance requirement by which certain states and counties had to get federal approval before changing election procedures. Activists also cite voter roll purges, strict voter ID laws and scaling back early voting as some of the issues that make it harder for people of color to participate in the franchise.</p><p><br/></p><div class="rm-embed embed-media"><div class="flourish-embed flourish-map" data-src="visualisation/662942" data-url="https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/662942/embed"><script src="https://public.flourish.studio/resources/embed.js"></script></div></div><p><br/></p><p>"We must all work to end systemic barriers that deny our citizens their right to vote, especially in Black communities across the South," said Lita Pardi, vice president of community at Community Foundation of Greater Atlanta. </p><p>"This initiative is especially important right now, as millions of people across the country feel the urgency to make our voices heard this fall after the continued silence from our leaders on the many Black people being killed by police," said Huang. "Voting won't solve this problem the day after the election but in order to begin dismantling white supremacy, we need to ensure that every voter of color is able to cast their ballot without interference or hardship."</p><p>While the grants will start as a ramp-up to the general election, the investments in these organizations will continue through 2022.</p><p>"We're also aiming to help groups build capacity in between federal election cycles — too much of this work is transactional where groups are only supported ahead of presidential and congressional elections," Huang wrote. "We plan to help sustain these organizations during local election cycles by providing multi-year grants."</p><p>Grants are also available to organizations working with other voters who face major barriers to participation like returning citizens, young people and those who have been purged from voter rolls.</p><p>The first round of grants will be distributed in July through an invitation-only application. An open call for a second round will take place later this summer.</p>
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Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images
The line at an Atlanta polling place Tuesday, where some waited longer than three hours.
Georgia's chaotic primary a late wakeup call, voting rights groups hope
Jun 10 2020
Problematic elections have become unsettlingly common this spring, but Georgia's primary is standing out as particularly disastrous.
By the morning after, civil rights and good government groups were joining mostly Democratic lawmakers in a stark warning: Without more spending, more polling places, more poll workers, more equipment testing and more efficiencies in their vote-by-mail systems, states across the country are bound to replicate Georgia's debilitating chaos.
And that, they said, would turn the November presidential into a national crisis, with the results in dispute and millions of voters concluding they'd been disenfranchised.
<p>The situation would not be helped by a spread of the sort of angry partisan finger-pointing occurring in Georgia about why Tuesday amounted to a master class in how elections should not be conducted — especially in a battleground state that could face potentially record turnout.</p><p>After the state urged people to vote by mail, many absentee ballots arrived late, were for the wrong voter or never showed up at all. That forced thousands to risk Covid-19 exposure to head out to vote in person — assuming they could locate one of a shrunken roster of voting centers instead of their usual polling places.</p><p>Once they'd arrived, many stood in line for several hours. (The last ballot in Atlanta was cast 195 minutes after the scheduled poll-closing time.) The roster of election workers was down; poll workers pressed into service only recently were minimally trained and overwhelmed. New touch-screen machinery malfunctioned frequently. And many precincts didn't have sufficient copies of paper provisional ballots as backup.</p><p>It was a perfect storm, which civil rights groups labeled a form of voter suppression that was as predictable as it was preventable.</p><p>"Georgia has had problems with voting for decades, but this was beyond anything in recent history that voters have seen," said Julie Houk of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which runs a hotline to help voters navigate election issues.</p><p>The problems, especially the long waits, were disproportionately worse in Atlanta and the closest suburbs, home to most of the state's black population. (A <a href="https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/waiting-vote" target="_blank">report</a> from the Brennan Center for Justice, a progressive voting rights group, has concluded that black voters across the country waited 45 percent longer to cast their ballots in the 2018 midterm election than white voters.)</p><p>Voting rights groups say the state's Republican government could have done more to prevent these issues. For instance, officials knew well in advance about the problems with the new equipment — purchased for every polling station in the state in the past year, at a cost of $104 million, to enhance election security by replacing the electronic machines that had no paper backup. A pilot run of the machines last fall showed malfunctions, but the state decided to use them anyway.</p><p>Another issue was with the absentee ballot process. When the primary was delayed from March because of the coronavirus outbreak, the state sent all 6.9 million voters an application to vote by mail, but the vendor that produced the ballots was located thousands of miles away in Arizona. This distance caused delivery delays and other inconsistencies.</p><p>But Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger blamed county election officials, especially in Democratic areas, for the misbehaving voting machines and long lines. Even before the polls closed, he announced an investigation into how the voting was conducted in Fulton and DeKalb counties, which Atlanta stretches across, so problems could be fixed before November.</p><p>"Obviously, the first time a new voting system is used there is going to be a learning curve, and voting in a pandemic only increased these difficulties," he said. "But every other county faced these same issues and were significantly better prepared to respond so that voters had every opportunity to vote."</p><p><em><a href="https://nationalsecurityzone.medill.northwestern.edu/covidanalyzer/voting-status/" target="_blank">[See how election officials in Georgia — and every other state — are preparing for November.]</a></em></p><p>While this primary was particularly disastrous, voter suppression has been prevalent in Georgia elections for decades. And the state's strict voter ID laws, demands for bureaucratic exactitude and penchant for closing polling locations were all aggravated by the public health crisis.</p><p>Even basketball legend LeBron James spoke out about the primary. "Everyone talking about 'how do we fix this?' They say 'go out and vote?' What about asking if how we vote is also structurally racist?" he tweeted.</p><p><br/></p><div id="dbe24" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="9b261377e1040e1711841c8cca3ed0da"><blockquote class="twitter-tweet twitter-custom-tweet" data-twitter-tweet-id="1270496646544207874" data-partner="rebelmouse"><div style="margin:1em 0">RT @KingJames: Everyone talking about “how do we fix this?” They say “go out and vote?” What about asking if how we vote is also structur…</div> — Jacob Gilyard (@Jacob Gilyard)<a href="https://twitter.com/G1LYARD/statuses/1270496646544207874">1591744979.0</a></blockquote></div><p><br/></p><p>Democrat Joe Biden's presidential campaign called what happened "completely unacceptable." President Trump's campaign laid the fault at Georgia's decision to make mail voting easier, which the president asserts without evidence is a recipe for fraud.</p><p>For months, voting rights groups have pointed to inconsistencies in how states, including Georgia, are handling their elections. States could be better prepared if they had enough federal funding. In March, Congress allocated $400 million for states to conduct elections amid the coronavirus, but voting rights groups say this is not nearly enough.</p><p>Amy Klobuchar, the Minnesota Democrat who has been the major proponent of having the Senate join the House in providing as much as $1 billion more this summer, said she hoped the Georgia mess would spur that cause.</p><p>"When we don't properly fund our elections and develop plans to protect voters, Americans — often in communities of color — get disenfranchised and that's what happened," she said.</p><p>With proper funding, Georgia could open more polling locations, hire and train more election workers and process the larger share of mail ballots.</p><p><a href="https://thefulcrum.us/votesafe" target="_self">VoteSafe</a>, a coalition of election administrators hoping to find bipartisan consensus for more money, emphasized the amount of work required in the next five months.</p><p>"From Wisconsin in April to Pennsylvania and D.C. last week to Georgia yesterday and certainly others, there are clearly opportunities to improve systems before November," said the new group's leaders, former GOP Gov. Tom Ridge of Pennsylvania and former Democratic Gov. Jennifer Granholm of Michigan. "Election administrators at the local, county, and state levels must act immediately and take seriously the threat of a second wave of Covid-19 to safeguard our elections this fall."</p>
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Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images
Georgians were faced with long lines and problemnatic equipment almost as soon as polls opened.
Long lines, polling site angst, missing ballots sully Georgia primary
Jun 09 2020
It didn't take long for problems to become clear on this month's second big day of voting.
But the challenges seemed almost entirely in one place: Georgia, by far the biggest of the five states with primaries Tuesday, and a rising presidential battleground after emerging as a singular focus of voting rights advocates for two years.
Thousands, especially in and around Atlanta, faced hours-long lines from the time the polls opened — and then were confronted by frequently malfunctioning equipment and diminished teams of inexperienced poll workers. Many others who took the state's advice and sought to vote remotely said they'd never received a mail-in ballot.
The varied troubles with the coronavirus-delayed primary, being conducted after two postponements in the ninth largest state, were the latest foretaste of the myriad challenges facing a presidential election during a pandemic.
<p>And that looks to be especially true in places like Georgia, where perceptions of institutionalized voter suppression have already depressed confidence that elections are both healthy and fair — and where this month's protests against excessive policing and racial injustice seem likely to generate a boost in registration and turnout.<br/></p>
<p>The day is "turning out to be a self-inflicted mess," Nancy Abudu of the Southern Poverty Law Center said in the early afternoon. "This is no way to run a democracy in 2020. Georgia state leaders need to learn from today to ensure that for remaining elections this year, every eligible voter can easily cast a ballot and have that ballot counted."</p>
<p>State officials drastically reduced the number of in-person polling sites to minimize voters' and election officials' risk of Covid-19 infection, meaning some locations were expecting to see as many as 10,000 voters. Delays because of social distancing and disinfecting practices were sure to compound the delays. </p>
<p>Tuesday was also the debut of paper-backup-generating touch-screen voting booths that have replaced all-electronic equipment statewide over the past two years — and in many precincts, the machines simply did not work.</p>
<p>Long wait times were especially apparent in cities and surrounding suburban areas. Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms of Atlanta called attention to these issues on Twitter about 30 minutes after polls opened, noting they were confined not only to her city but were spread into suburban Fulton County.</p>
<p>"If you are in line, PLEASE do not allow your vote to be suppressed. PLEASE stay in line," she tweeted. "They should offer you a provisional ballot if the machines are not working."</p>
<p>A record-breaking 1.5 million people responded to an invitation from GOP Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger — sent to all 6.9 million registered voters — and applied to vote by mail, and his office said 96 percent of the ballots requested had been delivered last week. By Tuesday almost 1.2 million early in-person and absentee votes had been cast.</p>
<p>There is not yet a clear understanding of how many more ballots will pour in by Tuesday night and how many were not delivered in time, but many voters who ventured out Tuesday said they did so because their absentee ballot had not arrived.</p>
<p>Fewer than 40,000 people typically vote absentee in a Georgia primary because a particular excuse is normally required.</p><p>"Right now, with the nation rife with racial tension and a pandemic laying claim on black lives, it's more important than ever that we show up at the polls and make our voices heard," said LaTosha Brown and Cliff Albright, the co-founders of the Atlanta-based Black Voters Matter Fund. "But we can only do that if leaders do their jobs and make our elections fair, safe, and open."</p>
<p>Gabriel Sterling, the state's voting implementation manager, disputed Raffensperger's reports of equipment problems and blamed a shortage of experienced poll workers because of the coronavirus.</p><p>"We have reports of poll workers not understanding setup or how to operate voting equipment. While these are unfortunate, they are not issues of the equipment but a function of counties engaging in poor planning, limited training, and failures of leadership. Well over 2,000 precincts are functioning normally throughout the state of Georgia," Sterling said.</p><p>The election includes the Democratic presidential primary as well as partisan primaries for Congress and state offices and some nonpartisan local elections. Interest has been heightened especially for Democrats, who view Joe Biden as a genuine contender for the state's 16 electoral votes and think they have a shot at electing a senator from their party for the first time in two decades.</p><p>The elections in the other four states were unfolding with less tension:</p>
<p><strong>Nevada</strong> automatically sent all 1.8 million registered voters a mail-in ballot for the primary. As of Monday, more than 343,000 had been returned. Although a majority of Nevadans will vote remotely, in-person polling sites are also available.</p>
<p><strong>North Dakota</strong> was the only state Tuesday to conduct its primary exclusively by mail. The state doesn't have voter registration, so election officials sent absentee applications to all residents of voting age, about 585,000. Mail ballots had to be postmarked by Monday to be counted.</p>
<p><strong>South Carolina</strong> officials temporarily lifted the excuse requirement for absentee voting, but didn't go as far as to mail applications to every voter. Information on voter turnout won't be released until after polls close at 7 p.m., but participation in the primary is expected to be at a record high.</p>
<p><strong>West Virginia</strong> voters were sent applications to vote by mail, but they also had the option to vote in person early and on Election Day. Voters with disabilities were allowed to cast their ballots online. Of the more than 260,000 who requested to vote by mail, 76 percent of them had already returned their ballot before the primary. Ballots must be postmarked by Tuesday and received by June 15 to be counted.</p>
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Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images
Georgia's top court ruled Gov. Brian Kemp can appoint a new Supreme Court justice, rather than hold an election.
Kemp's scrapping of a Georgia election was OK, top court says
May 19 2020
It turns out Gov. Brian Kemp can cancel an election and fill a vacancy through an appointment — at least in the case of the soon-to-be open seat on the Georgia Supreme Court.
Last week, the court ruled 6-2 that state officials could not be compelled to hold an election for Justice Keith Blackwell's seat after he steps down, so Kemp could go ahead with his appointment.
This move has opened up the Republican governor to more criticism that he'd rather stack the court with another conservative justice than allow Georgia voters to have their say.
<p>Georgia law allows the governor to fill vacancies when justices leave in the middle of their term. In late February, Blackwell announced he would not seek re-election, but wouldn't leave his post until November, just a few weeks before the end of his term.</p><p>Initially a judicial election was scheduled, but that plan was scrapped after a week when Kemp said <a href="https://thefulcrum.us/voting/georgia-supreme-court-election-canceled" target="_self">he would name the replacement himself</a>. This will be Kemp's second court appointment.</p><p>When the election was called off, two would-be candidates for the court seat — John Barrow, a former Democratic congressman from Athens, and Beth Baskin, a former Republican state legislator from Atlanta — sued to get the contest reinstated, arguing what Kemp and Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger did was illegal. After losing in state court, they <a href="https://thefulcrum.us/brian-kemp" target="_self">appealed</a> to the Georgia Supreme Court, but again the court did not rule in their favor.</p><p>"Even if Justice Blackwell's office is not vacant yet, if his accepted resignation will undoubtedly create a vacancy in his office on November 18, his term of office will go with him, and the next six-year term of his office that would begin on January 1, 2021, will never exist," Justice David Nahmias wrote in the majority opinion.</p><p>Justice Brenda Holbert Trammell wrote in the dissent that she is not against gubernatorial appointments, as she is one.</p><p>"However, in this instance, when the resignation will not result in a vacancy in the office until (originally) almost six months after the election, I cannot in good conscience agree that the election should be cancelled and the will of the people thrust aside as 'fruitless and nugatory,'" she wrote.</p><p>Kemp's list of potential appointees has been whittled down to four finalists: Judge Sara Doyle of the Georgia Court of Appeals, Judge C. LaTain Kell of Cobb County Superior Court, Judge Shawn LaGrua of Fulton County Superior Court and Judge J. Wade Padgett of the Augusta Circuit Superior Court.</p>
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