Companies Must Stop Funding Voter Suppression

This week’s passage of the voter suppression bill in Georgia is a 911 call to protect our democracy.

The legislation, which Gov. Brian Kemp signed into law the same day the state legislature passed it:

· Limits the number of ballot drop boxes

· Institutes more rigid ID requirements for mail-in balloting

· Shortens the period for early voting

· Gives the Republican-controlled legislature the power to control local election boards if they don’t like the outcome of an election

· And even makes it a crime to pass out food and water to those waiting in Georgia’s notoriously long voting lines

Such measures adversely affect working people, communities of color and young people who don’t always have government-issued ID, can’t get to the polls during the limited hours states establish and use mail-in voting to cast their ballots.

And Georgia isn’t the only state enacting such restrictions. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, which tracks voting laws across the country, there are 253 bills pending in 43 states, including Iowa, Arizona, Florida and Texas, that would impose similar restrictions on voting.

The vast majority of Americans support expansion of voting rights, not these measures that harken back to Jim Crow policies that kept African Americans from voting in years past. So how do these laws keep passing?

One answer is corporate and other dark money sources financing politicians who sponsor these bills in order to maintain their power. In 2020, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, only 22% of campaign donations came from small donors giving $200 or less. The rest of the $14.4 billion spent in the 2020 election, the most in U.S. history, came from organizations, PACs and large individual donors.

So, thanks to the 2010 Citizens United decision, which allowed corporations to spend unlimited funds on elections, those businesses have an outsized influence over who gets elected.

But there’s a way consumers can have an impact as well. And that’s to lobby companies they do business with not to support politicians who would restrict the most basic right of every citizen in this country. It’s the height of hypocrisy for companies to tout their Diversity and Inclusion policies and then turn around and give money to the likes of Georgia’s GOP legislators, who passed these voting restrictions in the wake of the first African American and first Jewish senators to be elected in the state.

Consumers are becoming more and more savvy about which companies represent their values and companies that don’t will pay a price through boycotts and adverse publicity. The efforts of Georgia voting rights advocates to boycott Coca Cola, Delta Airlines and Home Depot if they don’t publicly oppose the new law, will be replicated across the country. People are fed up and companies that don’t support citizens’ rights will feel it more and more in their bottom line.

Instead of continuing to throw money at politicians who would make it harder to vote, companies should instead be vocally supporting the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, now pending in Congress. The For the People Act would:

· Make voter registration automatic nationally

· Ensure access everywhere to mail-in voting and early voting

· Restore the right to vote for formerly incarcerated individuals

· Change campaign finance laws to reduce the influence of money in politics

· Limit partisan gerrymandering so political districts would more accurately reflect natural boundaries

· Create new ethics rules for federal office holders

The John Lewis Voting Rights Act would restore provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that were stripped out in 2013 by the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby v. Holder.

Allowing every citizen to easily vote should be a value that we all share, including corporations. There will be a price to pay for those companies that don’t hold that value.