Republican Voter Suppression Laws Are Targeting Democratic Voters

This past spring, Georgia governor Brian Kemp sat surrounded by a selection of his fellow GOP lawmakers in the state capitol. Everyone at the table was white and male. There, with the stroke of a pen, Kemp overhauled the election laws in the state that, just months earlier, had secured former president Donald Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election and Democrats’ control of the Senate. Record turnout by Black voters and unprecedented turnout among young Georgians ages 18-29 had helped turn Georgia blue for the first time since 1992. But the so-called Election Integrity Act, also known as Senate Bill (S.B.) 202, would ensure that even after the many hurdles the state’s most vulnerable voters recently overcame to cast their ballots, there can always be more.

“Folks are intentional about keeping folks out of our democracy,” Armani Eady, election protection fellow at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law tells Teen Vogue. “What about our people-power really puts you to pause and wants you to do these intentional things to block our access to the ballot?” 

Thanks to a decades-long effort, Republicans obtained and held fast to their control of a majority of state legislatures, with the GOP now controlling 62% of all state legislative chambers, and 54% of governorships. Eighteen states have already enacted more than 30 laws this year that will make it harder for Americans to vote. According to analysis by the Brennan Center, as of July, lawmakers in 49 states had introduced more than 400 bills that restrict voting rights.

It’s “a coordinated attack on voting rights and the freedom to vote across the country,” says Kara Gross, legislative director and senior policy counsel at the ACLU of Florida.

The pandemic forced millions of voters nationwide to wrestle with the question of how they would cast their ballot. Historically, absentee voting and voting by mail have been particular challenges for young voters who tend to move frequently, particularly for young voters of color. According to the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE), during the 2016 presidential election, young voters of color with no college experience were the least likely among all voters aged 18-29 to vote by mail. This shifted during the COVID crisis: Just 21% of Americans had voted by mail prior to the pandemic, but in 2020 a record 46% cast an absentee or mail-in ballot; Biden voters were almost twice as likely as Trump voters to report they had voted by mail.

Now laws in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, and Kansas will make it harder for voters to stay on absentee voting lists or to receive their ballot by mail, thereby making it even more complicated for young voters of color to access an absentee ballot. In Georgia, S.B. 202 will reduce the timeframe voters have to request a mail-in ballot by more than half, and the law will now also require all Georgia voters to provide their driver’s license number or state ID card when requesting an absentee ballot or, in many cases, returning it. Before Texas Democrats staged a walkout, the state was poised to pass a bill that contained, among other restrictive voting measures, provisions that would have limited early voting and curbed voters’ ability to receive applications to vote by mail.

These restrictions on absentee ballots coincide with moves by states to curb voters' access to ballot drop boxes. Drop boxes have been widely used by early and absentee voters for decades across red and blue states. But in the lead up to the 2020 election, drop boxes emerged as prime targets in the effort to curb access to voting. They became a popular talking point for Trump, who called them “a big fraud” and an “election security disaster.” Despite bragging that Florida had the “smoothest” election process in the country in 2020, in May, Governor Ron DeSantis, a Republican, signed a sweeping, restrictive voting bill that limits voter access to drop boxes, rather than 24/7 accessibility. Boxes must be staffed by an elections official at all times, though at one point lawmakers even considered an amendment that would have put boxes under video camera surveillance. If a ballot drop-off site is found to be accessible outside of regular hours, the local supervisor of elections could face a $25,000 fine.

As the Times reported, laws like Florida’s that restrict the hours voters can use drop boxes to turn in their ballot can be especially burdensome for voters of color. Experts say they’re most reliant on drop boxes after hours because it is often more difficult for those voters to take time off during the workday. In Georgia, after the signing of S.B. 202, drop-box sites will be dramatically reduced; in Fulton County, for example, the state’s most populous county and home to over one million people, including the highest number of Black residents in the state, the number of allotted ballot drop boxes fell from 38 to eight.

Nsé Ufot, chief executive officer of the New Georgia Project, was in her office at home in Atlanta when the news broke that Kemp had signed S.B. 202 into law. Ufot was talking with her staff, who she says, like her, were frustrated and disappointed but not surprised by the legislation’s passage. “We had basically been engaged in hand-to-hand combat with the Georgia legislature since the first day of the session,” she explains. “We watched it happen.” She points out that Kemp signed S.B. 202 beneath a painting depicting a former plantation. “Symbols matter,” Ufot tells Teen Vogue, and says she believes “that was deliberate and intentional and designed to send a message in case there was any confusion about the motivation behind signing that bill.” (Teen Vogue reached out to Kemp’s office for comment.)

Another restrictive approach that seems to specifically target Black voters is curtailing voting on Sunday. Sunday voting “souls to the polls” events have been a hallmark of services in Black churches, often held in partnership with civic organizations, and have for decades been part of efforts to mobilize Black voters. Yet GOP lawmakers in Georgia and Texas proposed bills that would effectively end this practice. (Georgia and Texas Republicans ultimately walked the provision back, with one Texas lawmaker suggesting the restriction was due to a typo.) “I’m not surprised, because my grandparents lived through it and my mother lived through it,” the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights' Eady, who is Black, says. “But I’m definitely disheartened because these [things] have real impacts on everyday people.”

Long lines have become common during recent elections in Georgia, particularly in the state’s urban, nonwhite communities. In recent years, including during the 2020 election, civic groups, volunteers, and donors have provided food and water to voters, some of whom may be facing up to 10 hours in line. Now, under S.B. 202, providing that kind of assistance is illegal. DeSantis considered similar legislation in Florida.

Voter-ID laws, which have been proven to disproportionately disenfranchise low-income and voters of color, were expanded in Georgia and Florida, and Montana’s voting legislation, passed in April, now requires all voters to show an ID to cast their ballot and to register to vote. Though it is not expected to become law there, Pennsylvania is among the latest states to introduce legislation that would feature a new, stricter voter-identification law, among other measures surrounding mail-in ballots, drop boxes, and signature verification.

And the list of new restrictions goes on. In Florida, it is now a misdemeanor for someone who is not an “immediate family member” to drop off someone’s sealed ballot, making it more burdensome for those who wish to vote but do not have the time or transportation necessary to get to a ballot box. In a state where 20% of the population is over 65, the law has great potential to impact elderly and disabled voters who may live independently but be unable to vote in person, and who may be without an immediate family member to drop off their ballot at a drop box. 

“There was no need for any of this,” says the Florida ACLU's Gross. She echoes the consensus on both sides of the aisle that, thanks in part to the state’s robust vote-by-mail system, Florida’s administration of the historically complex 2020 election was a “huge success.” That’s why she thinks the new legislation “was designed with one goal in mind, which is to make it more difficult for people to vote.”

With 2022 midterms already peeking over the horizon, Ufot and her team in Atlanta are gearing up for another frenetic election season. Although there’s much to address in the current political moment, including infrastructure, police violence, and abortion restrictions, Ufot says that, for her part, she is getting more comfortable putting forth voting as the primary issue facing America. “The right to vote is preservative of all of our other rights.… We need to move this to the top of the agenda,” she tells Teen Vogue. 

Turning her attention to the federal level, Ufot says, “If we don’t do something to pass H.R. 1 [the For the People Act] and H.R. 4 [the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act], and [thereby] stop these anti-voting bills that have been introduced in almost every legislature in the country, then we might as well acknowledge right now that the Biden-Harris administration is a lame duck administration — starting a few months ago.”

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Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue