From xxxxxx <[email protected]>
Subject We Need a Whole New Plan for Black Voters in the South
Date May 20, 2020 12:05 AM
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[It breaks my heart that even black women at church — unfailing
voters who rally their friends to turn out for every election — have
asked me, “Will our votes even be counted?”]
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WE NEED A WHOLE NEW PLAN FOR BLACK VOTERS IN THE SOUTH  
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Nsé Ufot
May 19, 2020
The New York Times
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_ It breaks my heart that even black women at church — unfailing
voters who rally their friends to turn out for every election — have
asked me, “Will our votes even be counted?” _

Supporters of Stacey Abrams in 2018 during her campaign for governor
of Georgia., John Amis/Associated Press

 

ATLANTA — I talk with black voters every day, and what I hear keeps
me up at night. Their faith in the political system is being eroded by
voter suppression and the government’s negligent response to the
pandemic. It breaks my heart that even black women at church —
unfailing voters who rally their friends to turn out for every
election — have asked me, “Will our votes even be counted?”

These very real challenges require a whole new playbook. Although
Donald Trump won Georgia by just 211,000
[[link removed]] votes in
2016, some 900,000 eligible black people
[[link removed]]
stayed home, a majority of them Atlanta residents. They were
unconvinced that voting for the Democratic candidate would mean
getting a president who represented them.

This is a treasure trove of gettable voters. They could _overwhelm_
the political system if Democratic candidates _persuade_ them that
voting will get them power to build the kind of state and country they
want. But that’s not what the Democrats are doing. Unless we address
our shortcomings, I fear we are on track for another catastrophic
Election Day.

Part of the problem is the mismanagement of the pandemic. Georgia’s
governor, Brian Kemp, defied science and logic when he started
reopening the state on April 24. One model predicts the number of
Covid-19 deaths will quadruple
[[link removed]]
by August.

Black people, who make up one-third of the population of Georgia but
represented 83 percent
[[link removed]]
of coronavirus hospital patients in March and half of deaths, will
continue to be disproportionately harmed. We’ve been screaming from
mountaintops about the health care crisis
[[link removed]]
in the state’s rural southwest for years; the region has a dire
shortage of doctors
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and hospitals. Yet a few majority-black counties there have some of
the highest death rates in the _country_.

The governor refused to fully expand Medicaid, leaving nearly half a
million people
[[link removed]] without
coverage (36 percent of whom are black and 22 percent Latino
[[link removed]]) and $45
billion [[link removed]] on the
table over the next decade. Now he plans to slash funding
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for state agencies, including the one that administers Medicaid, while
enrollment is projected to rise
[[link removed]].

Republicans in Georgia and other Southern states are weaponizing the
virus against black people while ramping up efforts to suppress the
vote.

Another part of the problem for November is that we haven’t
addressed the sins of elections past. Southwestern Georgia is also
where, long before anyone listened, black people sounded the alarm
that Mr. Kemp would try to steal the race for governor in 2018 from
his Democratic rival, Stacey Abrams
[[link removed]]
(disclosure: my organization was founded by Ms. Abrams). As secretary
of state overseeing his own election, Mr. Kemp served as umpire,
player and scorekeeper.

A consultant linked to Mr. Kemp recommended that the board of
elections in majority-black Randolph County close seven of its nine
polling locations. Why? The bathrooms in the polling locations lacked
handrails, which the board claimed violated federal disability law.

 

But the county had earlier refused to apply for money for the
handrails when given the chance. It dropped the consolidation plan
only after enormous attention from the news media. Such hyperlocal
voter suppression
[[link removed]] has
become rampant since
[[link removed]] the
Supreme Court freed elections officials
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in Georgia and other states from having to prove to the Justice
Department in advance that their voting changes would not be
discriminatory.Yet there’s more. As secretary of state, Mr. Kemp
purged 670,000
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voters from the rolls in 2017 and, weeks before the 2018 election,
withheld 53,000 more registrations under a spurious “exact match”
law
[[link removed]]
(70 percent
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of those registrations were from black people). He also oversaw the
shutdown of 214 precincts. Georgia had the longest lines
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in the country that year and the highest rejection rates of absentee
and provisional ballots. Mr. Kemp won the race by just 54,700 votes.

If Jim Crow laws suppressed votes by forcing black voters to guess the
number of jelly beans in a jar, Dr. James Crow, with a Ph.D. in data
science, has erected a more sophisticated suppression apparatus —
sophistication we have to match.

 

But I have not seen any campaign, political party or elected official
address voters’ pain at having their voices silenced. I know that
pain has also spread to Alabama and Mississippi, where people were
looking at Ms. Abrams’s candidacy as a glimpse into what was
possible. They also saw the theft. And they saw the world move on as
if a major crime against democracy had not been committed. That’s a
problem.

 

When we talk to college students now, the most common refrain we hear
is, “I know my vote won’t count.” My organization registered a
staggering 18,000
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17- and 18-year-olds in the months after the school shooting in
Parkland, Fla., in February 2018. They flooded our office with earnest
messages, wanting to learn how they could set up registration drives
in their schools.

 

We told them voting was a way to make material improvements in their
lives by electing candidates like Lucy McBath
[[link removed]], a Georgia representative who cares about
gun reform. Then they watched as they were robbed of their civic
voice, without any consequences. We have to address that if we want to
win in November.

 

Action is even more urgent because the pandemic is being used as cover
for _more_ voter suppression.

 

At the national level, the Republican National Committee doubled
[[link removed]]
its litigation budget to file even more lawsuits to limit vote by mail
access. Republicans aim to recruit up to 50,000 volunteers in 15 key
states to monitor polling places and intimidate voters. Those efforts
are aided by Donald Trump, who appointed
[[link removed]]
a top Republican fund-raiser to serve as postmaster general, and is
withholding
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a $10 billion loan from the Post Office, which desperately needs the
money.

 

Georgia may be the center of all this. The state has created an
absentee ballot “fraud”
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task force made up of
[[link removed]]mostly
prosecutors and mostly Republicans to hinder voting by mail. “If a
county official says my signature doesn’t match,” Cathy Cox, a
Democrat who is a former secretary of state for Georgia, asked
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a reporter, “is this task force going to show up with guns and
badges at my office or my home?”

 

Our office continues to receive a troubling number of inquiries about
whether absentee ballots will even be counted. The question is common,
and for good reason. We asked the 159 counties in Georgia where
they’ll place drop boxes for those who want to avoid human contact
during the pandemic. Only 78 provided locations and more than
one-quarter won’t have drop boxes.

 

These are monumental challenges that require a monumental response. We
need the courage to act on a scale we’ve never seen before.

 

If Democrats invest in an enormous marketing and organizing campaign
that _persuades_ black people and young people to participate in our
democracy, we will win. That campaign should answer uncomfortable
questions about what happened in Georgia in 2018 and explain how this
year will be different. Through millions of personal conversations,
organizers can connect the dots between who makes decisions that puts
their lives at risk and who can make things better. That’s how we
can show young people grieving the killing of Ahmaud Arbery in South
Georgia that voting is a way to create real change by electing new
sheriffs and prosecutors.

 

Campaigns never balk at investing significant resources to court
moderate white men. But when all the data is laid out about black
people, why does the political industry hesitate? Black people have
long been the most loyal supporters of the Democratic Party —
indeed, no other major voting bloc is as loyal
[[link removed]]
to a political party as black people.

 

Every 10 new black voters nets eight Democratic votes, but the party
gets only two net votes for every 10 new white, college-educated
female voters. Democrats have to stop treating black people as
deserving of only mailers after Labor Day and instead see them as the
core of the multiracial coalition.

 

We have to address voter suppression head on, identifying the hurdles
and offering solutions now, not in October. My organization is suing
Georgia [[link removed]]over its practice of throwing
out absentee ballots postmarked by Election Day but received after 7
p.m. that night. And for imposing a poll tax by sending absentee
ballot applications to voters without prepaid returnable envelopes.
This creates obstacles for people unwilling to go out during a
pandemic to buy stamps or vote in person.

 

Vote-by-mail is not a panacea. While it is the safest option we have
and it provides a paper trail, some states are using it in a way that
creates hurdles.

 

My organization is also building mobile video games to educate new and
infrequent voters. Bad actors are online, sowing doubt about basic
facts to undermine faith in the democratic process. That’s why we
are launching programs to monitor social media and provide media
literacy that will compete for black voters’s hearts, minds,
attention and votes. We need foundations, state and federal
governments and the Democrats to prevent and neutralize disinformation
campaigns
[[link removed]].
They ought to invest in trusted messengers to spread competing
messages with good information, in addition to inspirational
candidates who can alleviate voters’ concerns.

 

The next federal coronavirus legislation package must include $3.6
billion so states can expand their vote-by-mail initiatives and make
voting easier. States should mount public education campaigns that
include infographics and videos in multiple languages about how to
cast ballots during the pandemic. In Georgia, the secretary of state
must urge
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elections officials and lawmakers to increase funding and hire and
train more staff members to deal with the increase in absentee
ballots.

 

A vibrant, robust democracy is our greatest weapon against
authoritarian rule. And black people have been at the vanguard
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of fighting for that democracy. This year, more than ever, we need
overwhelming participation in our elections to neutralize voter
suppression and halt the rise of despotic, unaccountable leaders. Our
liberty and our lives are at stake.

Nsé Ufot (@nseufot [[link removed]]) is the
executive director of the New Georgia Project
[[link removed]] Action Fund.

 

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