Advocate Nsé Ufot of the right to vote has been fighting for a week like this.
For months, more than half a dozen activist groups, including her own New Georgia project, encouraged business interests to denounce the Republican’s efforts to restrict access to voting rights in Georgia. Billboards went up all over the country parodying corporate slogans, urging action. Lawyers have projected campaigns on the side of a hotel hosting NBA All-Star weekend participants in early March.
The companies offered cautious statements, calling what Ufot “hand-wringing” and “shrugging”. That’s until Wednesday, when Atlanta-based Delta Airlines and Coca-Cola issued strong condemnations over Georgia’s new restricted suffrage law, which was introduced last week. From there, criticism of Republican voting bills seems to be spreading like wildfire – moving across state borders and turning into a national trend that, according to activists, ultimately reflects the urgency of the large number of restrictions in the US.
“There is clarity about January 6 that people are getting, that it was an attack on our democracy,” Ufot said. ‘If you understand that the attack on the Electoral College was unpatriotic and anti-democratic, you must continue in the same logical street until you come to these 360-plus bills in 47 states that are trying to make it harder for Americans. to vote. “
The entry into major elections in the election policy debate, which experts call unusual, comes as Republicans across the country work to advance hundreds of restrictions, and the changes advocated by voters and civil rights groups will have an unequal impact on colored voters. According to the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, which monitored legislation, lawmakers have filed 361 bills in 47 legislatures. That’s 108 more than in the center’s last count on Feb. 19, an increase of 43 percent.
IDP legislators say these bills are necessary to improve public confidence in the results, even if they have doubts about the outcome of the 2020 election itself. By all accounts, the 2020 election was safe and the results accurate, despite repeated and false allegations by former President Donald Trump. His own attorney general, William Barr, said there was no evidence of widespread voter fraud, and the then president’s legal efforts to reverse the results failed in courtrooms across the country.
Advocates have said that the last year of speaking out for civil rights and especially the pandemic has encouraged companies to get involved in this as well.
“This week was really the week that America’s business company took up,” Jennifer Weiss-Wolf, vice president of development at the Brennan Center for Justice, told the New York University School of Law. “And really, I think the task was to put their money where they had to lay their mouths for all the things they said in 2020.”
Weiss-Wolf works with corporations in her fundraising work at the non-partisan organization, but said in recent years she has also started helping companies find their civic voice. By 2020, hundreds of companies have committed to giving employees time to vote or paying off their time to serve as polls. Amid a racial reckoning inspired by George Floyd, a black man who died last May after a white police officer knelt on his neck for more than eight minutes, many have issued statements expressing their support for civil rights and their commitment to anti-racist actions.
After a pro-Trump mob fueled by Trump’s stolen election lie attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, dozens of corporations interrupted donations from their political action committees, and some said they would not give it to Republicans who won the election. did not challenge.
The Civic Alliance, a non-partisan group that encourages civic business participation, issued a letter on Friday condemning all efforts to restrict access to the ballot, with nearly 200 companies, including Salesforce, ViacomCBS and The Estée Lauder Companies, as signatories.
“Businesses have their fingers on the pulse of what’s going on with their consumers and employees, and it’s a priority for people, and therefore companies make it a priority for themselves,” said Mike Ward, co-founder of the Civic Alliance, said.
A letter from black business leaders – published in a full-page ad in The New York Times on Wednesday and signed by more than 70 black businessmen – necessitated the actions of his group.
“It was the moment, it was like, yeah, it’s an urgent priority and we’re going to release something as soon as possible,” he told NBC News. “It went from something that took days to work to, to hours to work.”
Lisa Cylar Barrett, director of policy at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said the letter was a “very critical turning point.”
She said the trick now is to stay in the game.
“It’s very important that they stay involved, so it can not just be – make a statement and disappear,” she told NBC News. “We have to see it through.”
Ufot said the momentum encouraged her, but said it was not enough. Georgia law is still in the books.
“We still do not feel we have won,” she said. “Symbols are important, but in what way do we prevent us from going to jail for handing out bottled water to voters in the queue?”
Republicans responded strongly to the newfound openness of corporations. In Georgia, the State House immediately began revoking a tax credit the legislature had granted to Delta.
‘You do not feed a dog that bites your hand. You have to keep that in mind sometimes, “said Republican Georgia Speaker David Ralston, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (the attempt died in the state Senate.)
Elsewhere, Republicans have blasted criticism of their election policies as the latest issue in so-called cultural wars.
“Cancel culture and political activists wake up to every aspect of your life, including sports,” Republican Gov. Brian Kemp said in a statement Friday after Major League Baseball announced he would move the All-Star Game out of Atlanta. protest against state law.
Texas Lieutenant General Dan Patrick, a Republican, has tried to tie it to ongoing legislative battles over transgender students participating in sports, across the country and also in Texas.
“Texans are fed up with companies that do not share our values and try to dictate public policy,” he said in a statement.
Harvard Kennedy School Professor Alex Keyssar, author of The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States, said he had seen companies mobilize on LGBTQ rights, but never around voting rights. not.
“What makes it complicated is that in this case it is not just the issue. It is the fact that these laws are justified in the name of the ‘Big Lie’ and therefore it is a repudiation of the Republican Party as it exist today, “he said, referring to how Democrats described Trump’s stolen election lie.
Dale Ho, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Voting Rights Project, said the moves point to a much bigger change.
“It’s a good and a bad sign. It’s a good sign that voting rights are getting the kind of visibility I’ve been earning for a long time, but when I worked in this space years ago, I could not get it. “people to think about it,” he said in an interview Friday. “The fact that this is all happening is a bad sign, because it means that suffrage is very much part of the cultural wars.”
The historian Michael Beschloss, meanwhile, said the political grounds of the week fit well into the country’s civil rights history and pointed to Martin Luther King Jr. ‘s final speech, delivered on April 3, 53 years ago.
In it, King promised to use boycotts and corporate power to fight for justice, citing companies such as Coca-Cola and Wonder Bread as targets, arguing that these companies should engage in an ongoing union strike.
“I do not see how anyone can say that it is radical or inconsistent with the American tradition,” Beschloss said of the corporations responding to calls to get off the issue of voting from the side. “This instrument is an ancient instrument in American history.”