In the Aftermath: Examining the Impact of SB 202 in Georgia as Midterms Approach
By Nusrath Naurin
What does the aftermath of a sweeping anti-voting bill look like? In Georgia, we are about to find out.
In March of 2021, shortly after the Georgia Senate runoff elections, the Election Integrity Act (SB 202) was signed into law under Georgia governor Brian Kemp. The bill establishes new voting restrictions by limiting the use of ballot drop boxes, reducing the amount of time people have to request absentee ballots, providing the Georgia General Assembly with greater control over election administration, and inhumanely criminalizing “line warming,” where volunteers provide food and water to voters waiting in line to cast their ballots.
“We’re Georgia, so this isn’t something new,” said Rubiya Islam, a recent college graduate from Gwinnett County in Georgia. “We’ve had such a long history of Jim Crow laws, gerrymandering, and all of these restrictions throughout history so this is… just another way of limiting voting in a discriminatory way.”
The 2022 midterms will be the first significant election that Georgia will have since the passage of SB 202. There is a potential that the passage of this law will initiate a chilling effect that deters voters of color, new citizens, people with disabilities, and religious communities from casting an absentee ballot or making them unwilling to vote altogether. As a recent first-time voter myself, my experience at the polls has always been positive. So when SB 202 was passed, I felt frustrated over our lawmakers’ decision to make voting more challenging and less flexible for different groups of voters. It felt like a step back in the wrong direction.
Georgia has been a deep red state my entire life; as a South Asian American woman, I often saw how those elected to office have not been representative of all the different voices in my community. Suddenly, with the victory for progressive candidates of historically marginalized identities in the 2021 Georgia senate runoff election, I felt a sense of hope that things might be changing in my home state for the first time. Over the years, I witnessed Atlanta and the suburbs outside of the city become increasingly diverse as more Asian, Latino, Caribbean, and African immigrants choose to settle in Georgia upon moving to the United States. With this change in demographics, we were able to clearly see the change in voter turnout during the 2020 elections.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, early in-person voting and voting by absentee ballot have been used more extensively by Asian American voters since the 2020 elections, rather than voting in person on election day. SB 202 created significant controversy as critics argued that it infringes on civil liberties, prompting the Department of Justice to sue Georgia over the law on the basis of racial discrimination because the bill violates the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which forbids racially discriminatory voting rules. A disproportionately high number of voters of color tend to wait in needlessly long lines. As the Atlanta metropolitan area experiences rapid ethnic diversification and higher voter turnout of Black and Asian American voters, it seems that the bill was passed in an effort to create barriers for these communities of color and other marginalized groups to participate in our democracy and ultimately undermine their voices.
When conservative lawmakers passed SB 202, they proclaimed that the law’s intentions were to ensure that the voting system is more secure in the state of Georgia. However, even Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger confirmed, and has consistently reaffirmed in the years since, that there was no evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 elections. The majority of voters of color in Georgia tend to lean left, which means the new changes create structural barriers to voting to the advantage of those in power. The new law can deter voters of color and voters with disabilities, such as through a ban on line warming, which provides water and food to Georgians in a state notorious for long voting lines in precincts with a majority of non-white voters.
This is one of the many provisions of SB 202 that directly infringe upon the right to vote for people of color. For instance, 1 in 3 Asian Americans in Georgia are limited in English proficiency, which is one contributing factor that led 40% of AAPI voters in Georgia to vote absentee-by-mail during the 2020 general elections. Rubiya Islam believes that SB 202 clearly targets certain groups of voters.
“They’ve [Lawmakers] intentionally made it less efficient,” Islam said. “I mean, look at the demographics of who you think would be absentee voters: college students who live out of state, those who speak English as their second language, and people with medical disabilities.”
Out of the 200,000 AAPIs who voted, 45,000 were new voters in the 2020 election, and with the unnecessary voting barriers, it is likely that many immigrant communities will face disenfranchisement in the upcoming midterm elections. SB 202 creates a direct barrier for Asian Americans and communities of color to cast a vote by criminalizing certain assistance with ballot applications and significantly reducing the time window — from 180 days before an election to only 11 weeks — to request mail-in ballots.
Dr. Audrey Haynes, a professor of political science at the University of Georgia, said her initial reaction to the bill was that it was unnecessary given that the elections ran very smoothly throughout the pandemic after some counties expanded access to voting. To her, it seems like certain members of the legislature wanted to undermine those changes through the passage of SB 202.
“There are plenty of real problems in the state of Georgia. When your legislature spends inordinate amounts of time trying to ‘fix’ a problem that doesn’t exist, and in a way that seems to at least make the process problematic in certain areas, it is frustrating,” said Dr. Haynes.
Throughout the pandemic, the state of Georgia had been a leader in ensuring elections run smoothly and that they are conveniently accessible to voters. The passage of SB 202 was not just one, but many steps back in the wrong direction. The right to vote is a key foundation of our democracy and while we can’t go back in time to prevent this law from being passed, we can stay active in our local communities to prevent undemocratic voting bills from being passed in the future.
For those of us who are able-bodied, have greater language access at the polls, and are located in precincts with lower wait times to cast a vote — whether you’re in Georgia or another state — this upcoming midterm election is an opportunity to elect officials that will affirm and protect equal access to voting as a constitutional right. The time to take action is now. We need to mobilize and turn out at the polls, not only for ourselves, but also for our community. Our livelihoods and civil rights depend on it.
Nusrath Naurin is a Summer 2022 Communications intern at Asian Americans Advancing Justice | AAJC.
