Georgia’s new Trump-elected senator, Rev. Raphael Warnock, gave his first floor speech to the United States Senate, and it was a doozy. Unsurprisingly, he spoke in support of the Senate version of H.R. 1, the House’s attempt to usurp state control over their vote rules in reaction to some state’s efforts to rein in changes that facilitated voting in the last election.
“We are witnessing right now a massive and unabashed assault on voting rights unlike anything we have seen since the Jim Crow era,” Warnock said, pointing to a wave of bills that limit voting in Republican-controlled states like Arizona and his own Georgia. “This is Jim Crow in new clothes.”
He went on:
Politicians in my home state and all across America, in their craven lust for power, have launched a full-fledged assault on voting rights. They are focused on winning at any cost, even the cost of the democracy itself. I submit that it is the job of each citizen to stand up for the voting rights of every citizen. And it is the job of this body to do all that it can to defend the viability of our democracy.
To that end, Warnock argued, the Senate should pass the For the People Act, which would establish automatic voter registration nationally, provide for at least two weeks of early voting and preserve mail-in balloting, as well as the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would restore pre-clearance to the Voting Rights Act, forcing covered jurisdictions to submit new voting plans for federal approval.
We’re well past the days of poll taxes and literacy tests, and there is really not much of a question but that Georgia’s new laws are designed and intended to eliminate the ease with which Democratic voters, in general, and black voters, in particular, can vote. But is this really “Jim Crow in new clothes”?
A friend told me a few weeks back how wonderful it was that the pandemic gave rise to changes in voting procedures that enabled so many people to vote who had never voted before. I asked him why he thought so, and he replied, “Isn’t getting more people to vote an inherent good?” Is it? There are low information, low effort voters, people who neither know nor care enough to make the effort to register and vote. They could have. The can. But if it requires more than minimal effort, they won’t. And they don’t know the issues or the candidates’ positions, but will sell their votes for a chicken in very pot. I don’t necessarily blame them, but why is it a good thing for them to vote?
Because most people have an eight-second attention span and will see this as a reflection only of the last election, bear in mind that while the effort last November was to get people who otherwise couldn’t be bothered to vote out to vote against Trump, this is a Democrat issue. But what happens when the Republicans offer the uninformed and unmotivated freebies to get their vote and the sides shift and Dems are crying rigged election because vote harvesters come in with bushels of mail-in ballots from their low information, low effort voters? If history means anything, it’s that sides change and arguments swap without shame.
There is little doubt that the states should not create impediments to the exercise of the civic right to vote. But what are impediments? And after that’s been defined, what about going beyond neutral into facilitating voting?
Is it an impediment to require that a person register to vote at some point in, say, the two years prior to an election, or is that too much of a burden such that anything less than same day registration is voter suppression? Is it too much to expect a voter to show identification, to show that he is the citizen exercising his civic right?
It’s persuasively argued that requiring people to show up on one day, and only one day, that isn’t even a holiday from work, to vote is too onerous for many. But what’s needed to lift that burden? A work holiday? A four-day in-person voting period? Universal mail-in voting with a requirement that stamp-free ballots be received by a certain date, or received any time within a three-month period?
Why not internet voting, a voting app, vote-by-Facebook or Instagram? If mail-in ballots require too much work to get right, or that voters have pens (old school writing devices using ink), is that not too much of a burden on their exercise of this civic right? Should registered-at-birth voters be put to the task of requesting mail-in ballots or should they be sent to everyone, regardless of whether they’re still alive, still at the same address, still living in this country?
One of the tacit challenges of being required to physically show up at the designated polling place was that it required some small degree of effort to vote. That meant that only people who cared enough to make the effort would cast a ballot. Granted, this presented a burden to those whose work make that effort greater, even impossible, when they were otherwise willing to do so, and this served as an impediment to voting. Combined with the reality that any single vote was of marginal utility (yes, there are outliers where a few votes swung an election, but they’re outliers), and so it was not entirely irrational to shrug off voting because it was inconvenient and one vote didn’t really matter anyway.
This isn’t to suggest any particular outcome is better than any other. But then, the pyramid of citizenship suggests that many, perhaps most, voters won’t have sufficient information and interest in governance to contribute much to the vote. It’s not that citizens don’t have the right to vote, just as they have the right to yell “Fuck the draft” at everyone they see or watch videos of them crushing poor helpless animals in high heels, but does that make it a good idea that they do so? And if it does, what is the tipping point of effort to be required to exercise their right, or must states make voting so easy and effortless that lifting a finger is “Jim Crow in new clothes”?
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