Voting rights defender Nsé Ufot has been fighting for a week like this all year.
For months, more than half a dozen activist groups, including their own New Georgia Project, urged commercial interests to denounce Republican-led efforts to restrict access to voting in Georgia, she said. Posters were spread across the state parodying corporate slogans, calling for action. Supporters designed campaigns at a hotel that hosted participants for the NBA All-Star weekend in early March.
The companies offered cautious statements and what Ufot calls “wringing hands” and “shrugging”. That is, until Wednesday, when Delta Airlines and Atlanta-based Coca-Cola issued strong condemnations of Georgia’s new restrictive voting law, enacted last week. From then on, corporate criticism of Republican electoral bills seemed to spread like wildfire – crossing state boundaries and turning into a national trend that, activists say, finally reflects the urgency of the sheer number of restrictions under consideration in the USA.
“There is a clarity about January 6 that people understand, that it was an attack on our democracy,” said Ufot. “If you understand that the attack on the Electoral College vote was unpatriotic and undemocratic, then you need to continue on that same logical street until you get to these 360 more projects in 47 states that are trying to make it more difficult for Americans to vote.”
The incursion of large corporations into the electoral policy debate, which experts find unusual, comes as Republicans across the country work to promote hundreds of restrictions, changes that supporters of the right to vote and civil rights groups argue would disproportionately affect voters. by heart. On March 24, lawmakers submitted 361 restrictive electoral bills in 47 legislatures, according to the non-partisan Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, which is following the legislation. That is 108 more than at the center’s last count, on February 19, an increase of 43%.
Republican Party lawmakers say these projects are necessary to improve public confidence in the results, even when they cast doubt on the outcome of the 2020 elections themselves. Apparently, the 2020 election was safe and the results accurate, despite of the repeated and false statements of former President Donald Trump. His own attorney general, William Barr, said there was no evidence of widespread electoral fraud and that the then president’s legal efforts to reverse the results had failed in courts across the country.
Defenders said last year, when speaking out – on civil rights and the pandemic in particular – companies were also involved in this issue.
“This week was really the week that corporate America stepped back,” said Jennifer Weiss-Wolf, vice president of development at the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law. put your money where your mouth was for all the things you said you were going to do in 2020. ”
Weiss-Wolf works with corporations in their fundraising work at the non-partisan organization, but said last year that he started helping companies find their civic voice as well. In 2020, hundreds of companies pledged to give employees time to vote or pay leave to work as voters. In the midst of a racial calculation inspired by George Floyd, a black man who died last May after a white policeman knelt on his neck for more than eight minutes, many press releases publicized his support for civil rights and pledged anti-government actions. racist.
After a pro-Trump crowd fueled by Trump’s stolen election, he attacked the Capitol on January 6, dozens of corporations suspended donations from their political action committees, with some saying they would not give them to Republicans to challenge the results of the election.
The Civic Alliance, a non-partisan group that encourages civic participation by companies, released a letter on Friday condemning any effort to restrict access to ballots, with nearly 200 companies, including Salesforce, ViacomCBS and The Estée Lauder Companies, as signatories.
“Companies have their fingers on the pulse of what is happening to their consumers and employees and this is a priority for people and therefore companies are making it a priority for themselves,” said Mike Ward, co-founder of the Civic Alliance.
A letter from black business leaders – published on Wednesday in a full-page advertisement in The New York Times and signed by more than 70 black executives – made his group’s action imperative, he said.
“That was the moment, it was like, yes, this is an urgent priority and we are going to launch something as soon as possible,” he told NBC News. “It stopped being something that took days to work and became something that took a long time to work.
Lisa Cylar Barrett, policy director for the NAACP Legal and Educational Defense Fund, said the letter was a “really critical turning point”.
She said the trick now is to stay in the game.
“It is very important that they stay involved, so it can’t just be – make a statement and disappear,” she told NBC News. “We have to see this to the end.”
Ufot said she was excited about the momentum, but said it was not enough. Georgia’s law is still in effect.
“We don’t feel like we’ve won yet,” she said. “Symbols are important, but how does that prevent us from going to jail for distributing bottled water to voters in the queue?”
Republicans responded vigorously to the newfound candor of corporations. In Georgia, the state council immediately decided to revoke a tax credit that the legislature granted to Delta.
“You don’t feed a dog that bites your hand. You have to keep that in mind at times, “said Georgia Republican State House Speaker David Ralston, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. (The effort died in the state Senate).
Elsewhere, Republicans have criticized their electoral policies as the most recent issue in the so-called cultural wars.
“Cancel culture and awaken political activists in all aspects of your life, including sports,” Republican Governor Brian Kemp said in a statement on Friday after the Major League Baseball announced it would change the All-Star Game of Atlanta in protest against state law.
Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, a Republican, tried to link this to the ongoing legislative struggles over transgender student participation in sports across the country and also in Texas.
“Texans are fed up with companies that don’t share our values trying to dictate public policy,” he said in a statement.
Alex Keyssar, a professor at Harvard Kennedy School, author of the book “The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States”, said he saw companies mobilize around LGBTQ rights, but never around voting rights.
“What makes this complicated is that, in this case, it is not just the question. It is the fact that these laws are being justified in the name of the ‘Big Lie’ and, therefore, it is a repudiation of the Republican Party as it exists today ”. he said, referring to how Democrats described Trump’s stolen electoral lie.
Dale Ho, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Voting Rights Project, said the actions were indicative of much greater change.
“It is a good and a bad sign. It is a good sign that the right to vote is gaining the kind of visibility as an issue that I think has been deserved for a long time – so, years ago, when I worked in this space, I couldn’t let people think about it, “he said in an interview on Friday. “The fact that everything is happening is a bad sign, because it means that the right to vote is an important part of cultural wars.”
Historian Michael Beschloss, meanwhile, said the political wave of the week fits perfectly into the country’s civil rights history and pointed to Martin Luther King Jr.’s final speech, given on April 3, 53 years ago.
In it, King promises to use boycotts and corporate power to fight for justice, targeting companies like Coca-Cola and Wonder Bread as targets and arguing that these companies need to get involved in an ongoing union strike.
“I don’t see how anyone can say that this is radical or is not in keeping with American tradition,” said Beschloss of the corporations that responded to calls to stay away from the issue of voting. “This tool is an old tool in American history.”