VICE News: The GOP Is Making It Harder to Vote in Georgia to Ensure They Never Lose Again

Democrats won Georgia for the first time in a generation last election— and Republicans want to make sure that won’t happen again.

The GOP-controlled Georgia Legislature moved to pass a pair of bills on Monday to make it significantly harder for people to register to vote and cast their ballots. The two pieces of legislation combine a smorgasbord of new voting restrictions in the state that would make it much harder to vote.

The legislation came in response to Republicans losing the presidential election in the state —then promptly losing a pair of Senate seats—in 2020. President Biden narrowly won Georgia last November, but former President Trump howled that the election was rigged against him. While Georgia GOP officials refused to do his bidding to toss out the 2020 results, they’re more than happy to try to use those attacks on the legitimacy of the election to make sure they can hold onto power going forward.

Republicans used the fact that their own voters believe the lie that there was widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election as a reason to pass the restrictive new measures. …

Georgia’s system already made it harder for Black people to vote than their white counterparts. Two thirds of the polling places that had to stay open late because voters were still waiting in line during Georgia’s 2020 primary elections were in Black neighborhoods, according to a ProPublica/Georgia Public Broadcasting investigation.

“These bills are intentionally, horrifically, anti-voter,” Aunna Dennis, the Georgia president of the good-government group Common Cause, said in a statement. “When the 2022 election comes around, we won’t be able to vote in the ways we have used for the past 15 years—and it will be perfectly clear who’s responsible for rolling back the hands of time and returning Georgia to the Jim Crow era status quo of voter suppression.”