With Georgia’s pivotal Senate runoffs less than a month away, Republican officials are stepping up voter suppression tactics in the region with unprecedented speed. In Cobb County, the third most populous county in the state, less than half of early-voting locations are scheduled to be open for the January election; while there had previously been 11 locations for the county’s more than 537,000 voters, now there will only be five. “We lost several of our advance voting managers and assistant managers due to the holidays, the workload and the pandemic,” Janine Eveler, the Cobb County director of elections, wrote in a letter to the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and several other advocacy groups that voiced outrage. “The remaining team members who agreed to work would do so only if the hours were less onerous.”
As the New York Times reported, Cobb County has historically leaned blue, with president-elect Joe Biden “winning it by 14 percentage points.” Among Democrats, there’s suspicion that Georgia officials’ verdicts in the weeks before the runoff might not be entirely aboveboard. (Georgia’s election apparatus is controlled by Republicans.) “There is the stated reason that we’ve been given…but then there’s also the perceived action of having 10 polling locations open to early voting in an area that didn’t fare well for the current majority parity,” Erick Allen, a Democratic state representative, told the Times. “The perception is that there is a fear that doing the same thing would have the same result or contribute to the same result that would be unfavorable to the majority party.”
As noted by the Times, “Some of the locations being closed, such as the Smyrna Community Center in Smyrna, are in neighborhoods with large Black populations,” in keeping with efforts from both Republicans and Donald Trump to target Black voters and undermine their rights. The NAACP and Fair Fight Action, led by Stacey Abrams, reportedly offered to help with staff recruitment to limit location closures, but according to the Times, Eveler said there’s not enough time before the election to train new volunteers. In addition to limiting early-voting locations in Democratic-leaning areas, reports have also emerged that GOP Senate members are pushing to tamp down on absentee voting and implement photo ID requirements. In an election that saw Biden receive a large percentage of absentee votes, these moves too have raised eyebrows.
Georgia became an unexpected battleground in November, when the state swung blue for the first time since 1992. As such, GOP politicos are ramping up their presence there while donating millions of dollars to the campaigns of Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, who are taking on Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff.
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