Tag: GOP voter suppression

As the voting-rights fight moves to Texas, defiant Republicans test the resolve of corporations that oppose restrictions

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As the battle over a new Georgia law imposing identification requirements for mail ballots and other voting limits raged this month, Republicans in Texas knew they would be next — and acted quickly to try to head off the swelling number of corporations that had begun to scrutinize even more restrictive proposals being considered there and around the country.

Gov. Greg Abbott angrily declined to throw the first pitch at the Texas Rangers’ home opener, accusing Major League Baseball, which had announced plans to pull its All-Star Game from Atlanta, of buying into a “false narrative” about Georgia’s new law. The next day, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick responded to an early trickle of corporate statements denouncing the proposals under consideration in Austin, calling the critics, including Texas-based American Airlines and Dell Technologies, “a nest of liars.”

“Texans are fed up with corporations that don’t share our values trying to dictate public policy,” Patrick said in a separate statement. Continue reading.

Republican ‘base is vanishing’: These figures show why the GOP is hell-bent on voter suppression

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With Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp having recently signed into law a voter suppression bill that civil rights activists are vehemently protesting against, Republicans in state legislatures all over the country are pushing equally repressive bills. Conservative Washington Post opinion writer Jennifer Rubin, this week in her column, emphasizes that Republicans are deathly afraid of evolving demographics. And she points to recent data from the Democratic firm TargetSmart and Gallup as evidence of why the GOP is so worried and is resorting to blatant voter suppression.

TargetSmart, Rubin notes, has “compiled information on more than 98% of those who cast ballots last year.” The firm reports that “non-college educated Whites dropped from 53.8% of the electorate in 2016 to 49.2% in 2020” and that “nationally, total turnout increased by 12% relative to 2016, turnout among (Asian-American and Pacific Islander) voters surged by 43%, and Latino turnout increased by almost a third of all votes cast.”

Rubin notes that although former President Donald Trump performed better among Latinos in 2020 than he did in 2016, he “still lost 65% of these voters.” Continue reading.

Hundreds of Companies Unite to Oppose Voting Limits, but Others Abstain

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Amazon, Google, G.M. and Starbucks were among those joining the biggest show of solidarity by businesses over legislation in numerous states.

Amazon, BlackRock, Google, Warren Buffett and hundreds of other companies and executives signed on to a new statement released on Wednesday opposing “any discriminatory legislation” that would make it harder for people to vote.

It was the biggest show of solidarity so far by the business community as companies around the country try to navigate the partisan uproar over Republican efforts to enact new election rules in almost every state. Senior Republicans, including former President Donald J. Trump and Senator Mitch McConnell, have called for companies to stay out of politics.

The statement was organized in recent days by Kenneth Chenault, a former chief executive of American Express, and Kenneth Frazier, the chief executive of Merck. A copy appeared on Wednesday in advertisements in The New York Times and The Washington Post. Continue reading.

How the corporate backlash to Georgia’s new voting law is shaping other fights around the country over access to the polls

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Behind closed doors, aides to Georgia’s top Republicans and its leading business interests spent the final days of March hashing out new voting legislation in an effort to quell a growing outcry that GOP lawmakers were pushing measures that would severely curtail access to the polls.

The Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce and representatives of major corporations, including ­Atlanta-based Delta Air Lines, worked directly with legislative leadersand the office of Gov. Brian Kemp (R) to exclude some of the more controversial proposals, according to people familiar with the discussions, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations. Republicans agreed to drop, for instance, language barring most Georgians from voting by mail and curtailing early voting on weekends. They even expanded early-voting hours in the final bill.

The hope of Republicans involved, according to a half-dozen people familiar with the process, was to pull off a delicate political balancing act: satisfying voters who believe former president Donald Trump’s false claims that he lost the 2020 election because of rampant fraud — while heading off accusations of voter suppression from the left. Continue reading.

More than 100 corporate executives hold call to discuss halting donations and investments to fight controversial voting bills

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More than 100 chief executives and corporate leaders gathered online Saturday to discuss taking new action to combat the controversial state voting bills being considered across the country, including the one recently signed into law in Georgia.

Executives from major airlines, retailers and manufacturers — plus at least one NFL owner — talked about potential ways to show they opposed the legislation, including by halting donations to politicians who support the bills and even delaying investments in states that pass the restrictive measures, according to four people who were on the call, including one of the organizers, Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a Yale management professor.

While no final steps were agreed upon, the meeting represents an aggressive dialing up of corporate America’s stand against controversial voting measures nationwide, a sign that their opposition to the laws didn’t end with the fight against the Georgia legislation passed in March. Continue reading.

This columnist pulls the mask off far-right Sen. Josh Hawley as he tries to play the victim

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During a Thursday-night appearance on Fox News this week, Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri railed against the “woke corporations” that have been speaking out against Georgia’s new voter suppression law. Georgia-based companies like Delta Airlines and Coca-Cola have been among the law’s outspoken opponents, and Major League Baseball has decided to move its 2021 All-Star Game from Georgia to Colorado because of the law — all of which infuriates Hawley. Liberal Washington Post opinion writer Greg Sargent is vehemently critical of Hawley’s comments in his Friday column, stressing that although the far-right Republican senator promotes himself as a populist, there is nothing populist about voter suppression.

On Fox News, the-far Hawley complained, “What’s happening in Georgia is what they tried to do to those of us who stood up for election integrity back in January. Anyone who has said that our elections need to be free, they need to be fair, we need to consider election reform — they try to cancel you. And now, the woke corporations are trying to do the same thing to Georgia. And they’re going to try to do it to anybody, any state, any person who stands up for election integrity.”

Hawley was trying to paint himself as a victim. But as Sargent points out, the far-right Missouri senator was being very anti-democracy when he refused to honor the results of the 2020 presidential election — and he is being just as anti-democracy now by supporting voter suppression in Georgia. Continue reading.

How Voting Laws Suppress the ‘New South’

GOP-backed proposals to restrict voting are steadily gaining traction across the Sun Belt, aiming to slow the effects of ongoing demographic shifts that favor Democrats.

LOOKING BACK IN AN election cycle or two, it may be that the political and economic fallout gripping Georgia today over its controversial new voter law proves to have been a sign of an inevitable march toward a very different electoral map.

The next frontier in the battle over voting rights is already creeping toward other states across the South and the Sun Belt that have two things in common: They are all seeing a similar rapid demographic shift in their electorates that stands to reimagine the American political landscape. And they have entrenched political interests trying to stop it.

After a year of record turnout, especially among voters of color in Southern states, and a barrage of unfounded fraud claims propagated by the former president, GOP-led state legislatures are leading the charge to challenge and amend voting laws. They saw their first big success last month in Georgia. That sweeping law among other things imposes identification requirements for absentee ballots, limits ballot drop boxes and shortens runoff elections. Continue reading.

Video shows Texas GOP official seeking ‘army’ of volunteers to monitor polls in mostly Black and Hispanic Houston precincts

A leaked presentation from the Harris County Republican Party shows an official citing widespread voter fraud in a call for 10,000 poll watchers in Texas. (Common Cause Texas)

McConnell in tricky spot with GOP, big biz

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Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), a longtime ally of the business community, now finds himself in a tricky position of having to manage the GOP’s increasingly awkward relationship with corporate America. 

McConnell, in a major break from character, earlier this week slammed companies such as Major League Baseball, Delta Air Lines and Coca-Cola for criticizing Georgia’s new election law, which President Biden called “Jim Crow in the 21st century.” 

The GOP leader called that a complete mischaracterization and has repeatedly pointed to a Washington Post analysis giving Biden “four Pinocchios” for “falsely” claiming Georgia’s statute ends voting hours earlier.  Continue reading.

McConnell backs away from warning businesses to stay out of politics

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Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Wednesday backed off his stern warning that companies such as Major League Baseball, Delta and Coca-Cola should stay out of high-profile political fights after they criticized Georgia’s new election law.

“I didn’t say that very artfully yesterday. They’re certainly entitled to be involved in politics. They are. My principal complaint is they didn’t read the darn bill,” McConnell said Wednesday at a press conference in Paducah, Kentucky.

The GOP leader softened his tough talk from earlier in the week, when he warned that companies would face “serious consequences” if they become “a vehicle for far-left mobs to hijack our country.” Continue reading.