Sitting in his congressional office in Atlanta, surrounded by dozens of awards for civil rights, Rep. John Lewis can't believe he is still talking about voting rights.
"It's unreal. It's unbelievable," Lewis said. "After all of these many years, we're still fighting to protect the rights of people to participate in a democratic process."
It's been 54 years since the Voting Rights Act was signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson, and for decades it stood as a rock-solid law that protected a right that Lewis holds sacred. "It is the most powerful nonviolent instrument or tool that we have in a democratic society," he said. All that changed with a 2013 Supreme Court case in Shelby v Holder, where the justices ruled that states no longer require federal approval to impose new voting laws as previously codified in the Voting Rights Act.
Former UN Ambassador Andrew Young, another renowned civil rights fighter, said that while he and his colleagues were working on registering voters, groups opposing equality were also hatching their own plans.
"We passed the Voting Rights Act in '65," he said, and "'right-wing-attacks on the Voting Rights Act started with an attempt to take over the courts."
According to a Mother Jones report, released this September, more than 1600 polling places have closed since the Shelby ruling and over 200 of those polling locations are in Georgia. Activists say that the statistic highlights a jump in voter suppression since 2013 and also demonstrates how much more complex it is to fight against it. "I remember in another day and another time and another period when Julian Bond and myself and a few others went out on, what we call, voter registration tours all across the South just trying to say to people don't be afraid, be brave," Lewis reflected.
That's something that Adrienne Jones, Morehouse College political science professor, says was a marker of the voter intimidation days of old. Today, voter intimidation looks a little different, she said. "It looks like getting rid of absentee ballots based upon the fact that a signature might not be quite right or not allowing provisional ballots when people are unable to identify where they are supposed to be voting."
In Georgia, the state government has been accused of carrying out the types of voter suppression tactics that Jones described. This battle between the state and voting rights advocates came to a head in 2018 after Democrat Stacey Abrams lost the governor's race to then-Secretary of State Brian Kemp, a Republican. Kemp has been accused of purging almost 10 percent of the voter rolls in Georgia during his time as Secretary of State, an amount that could have resulted in a different outcome in the close race between him and his opponent. Abrams has since created a non-profit organization, "Fair Fight," to combat voter suppression in her state as well as around the country.
Georgia tried to counter criticism about the 2018 midterm election result by making changes to the way Georgians vote ahead of 2020. Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said House Bill 316 should give them more resources to ensure voter security. "We're bringing in the new machines, new cybersecurity, and we want to make sure that everyone who has the right to vote is voting."
But, according to voting rights advocates like Umer Rupani of the Georgia Muslim Voters Project, new machines don't actually give all Georgians the right to vote. He says "lack of language access," could be a deterrent to some voters. Rupani adds that in 2018, "we saw a lot of people being given provisional ballots when they weren't supposed to be given provisional ballots."
Raffensperger is unwavering in his support of provisional ballots and voter I.D. laws, "We do have photo I.D., and that has shown that it doesn't discourage anyone from voting but makes sure that the people that show up to vote are who they really say they are." Professor Adrienne Jones thinks that things like voter I.D. laws discriminate against people of color more than other groups, "Maybe I'm an elderly black woman who didn't have a birth certificate in the first place," and it's "definitely akin to a poll tax and it definitely has the same effect."
One organization that combats poll taxes, voter disenfranchisement, and voter suppression in the Peach State is the ACLU of Georgia. The organization's Legal Director, Sean Young, said that in the state's 159 counties "much of the voter suppression happens under the radar." Since the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, he said, "now groups like the ACLU of Georgia have to run around and play whack-a-mole and put out these little fires." Sean Young has had some success in putting out those fires, with the ACLU of Georgia reopening polling places that had been closed in some rural counties.
Executive director of the ACLU of Georgia Andrea Young, working to continue her father Andrew Young's civil rights legacy, explained the profound impact of voter suppression on the state.
"People don't often make the connection between the fact that Georgia never took the Medicaid expansion and their ability to vote, and the ability of poor people, especially, to cast a ballot," she said. "They don't make a connection between Georgia's abortion ban, which just passed by only two votes in the House of Representatives, and the ways that there were long lines in 2018 to be able to cast a ballot." That's a connection the ACLU is aiming to help people make.
For both sides of this complicated issue, there are clear but challenging ideas of what a successful vote in 2020 will look like. For Raffensperger, "what you want to really know is that we got the results accurately counted and that's my job as Secretary of State."
But, for Andrea Young, "an election without violations of people's constitutional rights would be a win for us." When asked if there was any chance of that happening, with a laugh she conceded "zero."
i24 News Senior National Correspondent Michael Shure contributed to this report.
