From Truthout
When we first reported that handing a slice of pizza to a voter waiting three hours in a line is now a felony in Georgia, other media quickly picked up the story, highlighting the cruelty of Georgia Republicans making predominantly Black voters suffer from hunger and thirst in lines the GOP deliberately made long by closing polling stations in majority-Black precincts.
But the food-in-line prohibition is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to horrific provisions hidden in the 95 pages of Georgia's new anti-voting law.
Donald Trump infamously demanded the Georgia secretary of state "find 11,780" votes. The MAGA crowd in the Georgia legislature found 364,541 votes to cancel, that is, voters whose ballots would be blocked from the count in the next election.
To understand how this mass attack on citizens will work, we have to go back to December 21, 2020, just before the Georgia Senate runoffs, when True the Vote, a Texas group founded by Tea Party crusader Catherine Engelbrecht, challenged the right of 364,541 Georgians to cast ballots. You read that number right: More than a third of a million voters almost lost their vote.
Almost. County elections boards, facing threats by the ACLU and Stacey Abrams's Fair Fight, rejected the challenges, noting that the numbers were too huge to be credible. One voter can challenge another if they have personal knowledge that the other voter is a fraud. The local shills used by the Texas group knew nothing of those they challenged.
However, the new Georgia law specifically authorizes unlimited challenges. And Georgia's Republican Secretary of State has gleefully invited True the Vote to attack voter rolls. (For more on Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, whom voting rights lawyer Gerald Griggs calls the "Vote Suppressor in Chief," see my report for Democracy Now!)
But won't those same county boards kick out any new absurd challenges? The MAGA mob in the legislature has got that covered. Under the new law, the State Board of Elections can remove a county board if it doesn't, in the state's opinion, rule properly on these challenges.
The True the Vote challenges, officially backed by the Republican Party, centered on Atlanta counties with mostly voters of color. Voting rights attorney Barbara Arnwine, founder of Transformative Justice Coalition and co-plaintiff with Black Voters Matter, warns that the new state board will have the authority to remove the local board and override local decisions.
Follow the MoneyWhere the heck did True the Vote's Engelbrecht get the dollars to mount this multi-county attack on Georgians?
In 2016, our investigator Zach D. Roberts confronted Engelbrecht about her funding by the Koch Brothers, which she didn't deny. ProPublica also traced True the Vote's lucre to the Bradley Foundation, which our team exposed as the funders of attempts to wrongly purge Black voters in Milwaukee.
Don't discount True the Vote. The lawyer who is leading their attack in Georgia is James Bopp Jr., who argued for Citizens United in the Supreme Court case that opened the door to corporate money poisoning our elections.
Follow the ListThat's the money. But True the Vote's list of challenge-worthy votes supposedly came from the U.S. Post Office's National Change of Address registry.
Sounds official. Sounds legit. It isn't. In 2017 and 2018, Brian Kemp, then both Secretary of State and candidate for governor, used a similar list to remove hundreds of thousands of voters on the grounds they had moved out of Georgia.
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