San Goku wrote: ↑Tue Apr 06, 2021 1:37 pm
So more politics seeping in to my sports. MLB boycotting Georgia All-Star weekend for their new voting laws.
I used to care about shit like that, but then after Citizens United my employer wanted me to donate my salary to their super pac. After that I stopped giving a shit about sports organizations and musicians doing this.
It'd be nice if he addressed the *actual* problems with the law instead of the low hanging fruit/sound bites that more left publications can latch on to as well in order to appear more balanced. He also snuck a few misfires of his own in there. Nothing too terribly off, I'd chalk it up to his slant versus malicious intent.
The new law cuts the time to request early ballots more than half, cuts the time before the ballots are sent in just under half, and increases the time that they must be received in. So in the new law, absentee ballots aren't sent out until 29 days before the election instead of 49 and have to be received by 11 days before the election instead of 4. Better hope there's no an issue with the mail... oh right it's worse in cities.
It also limits the number of drop boxes, the hours they can be open, and the locations where they can be placed. It does guarantee a minimum hours that polls are open, but it's exactly what the youtuber pointed out - they were already open for those hours. It allows for counties to go up to 7 to 7 (that is not default in GA), but it also caps it at 7 to 7. Counties can't decide to extend it. It makes 1 drop box mandatory, but also limits the maximum number of boxes per county. So... the places that maybe didn't have drop boxes before (more rural areas) now have to have one, and the places that need lots of drop boxes (urban areas) have fewer. It's a blatant push for GOPers. Don't get me wrong - forced drop boxes are a good thing - why do we need a limit on them?
There's random other shit too, like any voter being able to challenge as many voters' legitimacy as they want and holding runoffs within a MUCH closer time period now (before GA finished counting last election, lulz).
And of course the real fun one - stripping the power over elections from the Secretary of State to instead a board appointed by the legislature. The board then has the power to remove superintendents and put in their own superintendents who can in turn put in their own personnel. The limitation - this can only happen in up to 4 counties at once. Oh, that's how many they need to do for the biggest Democratic areas of the city? Go figure.
The law is more classist than racist, it's just that the people that it's impacting in this particular case are much, much more likely to be black. It's even more just a power grab by the GOP, but again - that disproportionately affects blacks than whites.