alex51324:

kyrianne:

[Image ID: A series of screenshots from a Twitter thread by Jason Coupet / professajay.

Text begins: Man voting in Georgia is so different than in Illinois. When I lived in chicago, during early voting, I went to the local elementary school, waited in line about ten minutes, and they gave me a sheet of paper. I checked people off then I put it in the machine and left.

Not Georgia. We drove downtown because *every* other polling place had a line >90 minutes. We paid ten bucks to park. We went in the building, then emptied out pockets to go through a metal detector. We then saw a sign about where to park to get our parking validated. Inside.

We then waited in line ~80 minutes. We got to the end and we were given a form to fill out (?). We were told *not* to sign it until told. Then we were moved into a waiting room where we were given a ticket number, like when you are at the dmv.

We were told to get our IDs out and wait. We waited here for 15-20 minutes. When your number is called they took your form, did some stuff on the computer, then told you to sign the form. Then you get a little green card. You insert it into the machine.

Then you go through three or four prompts, including a very serious™️ warning about perjury, a totally necessary warning given how huge a problem stolen identity is for the purposes of voting on behalf of someone else.

You then finally vote, and after an “are you sure” prompt you get a sheet. You then have to walk the sheet over to feed it into a machine. About half of these were working.

The bottleneck was clearly the weird application and waiting room thing. There are two dozen people at a time sitting to have their stuffed checked. Think of it as regular voting except when you got there they had to run a credit check for *each person* like you need financing.

It was easier finishing my PhD paperwork. Thankful for the kind people (nearly all black women) the shepherded the processes. But man if you are poor or disabled or whatever, good luck yo. That should have been easier. We finished tho. Text ends.

Image ID: Two Black people are standing beside a city street and smiling at the camera, a man and a woman. The man has close-cropped hair and a beard. He is wearing a black hoodie that says Southside and has a sticker on his chest with a peach on it. The woman has large tortoiseshell browline glasses and long twist locs. She has a light brown leather crossbody bag, and is wearing a salmon-colored windbreaker. She also has a peach sticker on her chest, which she is pointing to. Her hand has a wedding ring. End ID]

Not-so-fun fact:  the reason this kind of shit is happening is that, in 2013, the Supreme Court killed the federal oversight provision of the 1965 voting rights act.  

Quick history lesson:  After the US Civil War, the 15th Amendment established that states could not bar Black people, including freed slaves, from voting.  This happened during so called “Radical Reconstruction,” the brief period where former Confederate officials were barred from political participation. 

 As soon as that period ended, white officials in the former Confederate states began making laws to prevent Blacks from exercising their right to vote–the poll taxes and “literacy tests” that you’ve probably heard of; there were also some other things like requiring a first-time voter to be vouched for by an established voter.  All of this was legal because the Constitution gives each state the right to decide how it’s going to conduct elections.   They could have any restrictions they wanted, as long as those restrictions could theoretically be applied equally to all races.  

After decades of Black struggle for civil rights, the Voting Rights act reiterated what the 15th Amendment already said, but added an enforcement mechanism, in the form of federal oversight of voting procedures in locations that, according to a formula laid out in the Act, had a history of discriminatory practices in the conduct of elections.  Those states could still set their own procedures, but they had to run them by the Department of Justice, and allow federal observers to monitor actual their actual practice.

In 2013, some of those states went to the Supreme Court and said, basically, “We’ve been doing this for 50 years now, we know how to run a fair election, some of our best friends are Black, honestly aren’t you the real racists for treating us differently due to our long history of racism?”

The Court agreed with this argument, despite critics predicting that removal of federal oversight would immediately begin a slow creep of practices that would make voting more difficult, in ways that would add up to a racially discriminatory effect.  

Lo and behold, just four federal election cycles–two presidential election cycles–since oversight was ended, here they are, back on their bullshit.