Jim Crow 2.0: As US elections near, new efforts to suppress Black votes.

Georgia primary today shines a light on Draconian measures to ensure Republican victories at the ballot box.

In the days and months leading up to today’s presidential primary in Georgia, activists have been on the ground in African American neighborhoods across the state working to prevent a rollback of voter rights that they say harkens back to the Jim Crow era.

After record voter turnout flipped the state from deep red to barely blue in the 2020 presidential elections, Georgia has become the epicentre of a GOP campaign to effectively deny African Americans’ access to the ballot box in the American South.

Georgia’s Republican legislators passed a melange of laws in 2021 intended to restrict voting in the state, strengthening voter identification requirements for absentee balloting, reducing the availability of drop boxes, and expanding the legislature’s authority in elections. Mirroring arguments made by GOP operatives nationwide, Republicans in Georgia contend that the measures are necessary to combat voter fraud. But Democrats and voting rights experts have countered that there is no statistical evidence of widespread voter fraud anywhere in the country, and that the reforms target African Americans who overwhelmingly support Democratic candidates and can therefore determine the outcome of elections when they turn out in large numbers, as was the case in Georgia in the 2020 presidential election.

Cliff Albright, co-founder of Black Voters Matter and executive director of the Black Voters Matter Fund, said that Republican lawmakers across a wide swath of the former Confederacy have been redrawing the borders of election districts to favour their own party (often called “gerrymandering”), purging voters from the rolls and rewriting laws to effectively disenfranchise African Americans. Alabama’s House of Representatives last week approved legislation that would make it a felony for anyone in the state to receive help in filling out an absentee ballot from anyone who has not been designated by elections officials or is not a relative, or co-inhabitant.

Under the proposal, anyone convicted of the crime could be sentenced to as many as 20 years in prison, on par with sentencing guidelines for manslaughter and statutory rape.