Donald Trump wants Brad Raffensperger to be secretary of state overseeing elections in Georgia. That, alone, should give any self-respecting American pause.

What the state needs is not more of the voter suppression that put a truly compromised candidate in the White House in 2016 or that allowed more than 1 million Georgians to be purged from the voter rolls and tens of thousands of registrations held in electoral limbo because of a typo, a hyphen, or accent mark.

What Georgia needs, instead, is democracy, which is something it hasn’t had in more than a decade.

Sign up to receive the latest US opinion pieces every weekday

In 2005, Georgia passed the first voter ID law by a state that was under the preclearance jurisdiction of the Voting Rights Act. In the wake of the civil rights movement, states like Georgia, that had a demonstrated history of discriminating against its minority citizens’ right to vote, had to have all of their voter regulations and laws approved by the US Department of Justice (DoJ) or the federal court in Washington, DC before implementation. Preclearance had provided a powerful check on the rampant abuses of the 15th amendment.

Georgia, however, emboldened by political appointees in George W Bush’s Department of Justice, forced a voter ID law through the state legislature, ignored Democrats’ concerns, especially those raised by African American and Hispanic legislators, and lied that the issue was “voter fraud”, although in the previous 10 years there were zero complaints of this sort sent to the secretary of state’s office. Nonetheless, Republican representative Sue Burmeister of Augusta said that the law was necessary because the only way African Americans were willing to cast a ballot in her district was if they were paid.

Since 2007, then, a proven racially discriminatory voter ID law has stalked Georgians’ access to the ballot box.

Not surprisingly, when the staff attorneys at the DoJ reviewed this law, it was clear that it was dripping with discrimination. There were massive racial disparities between those who possessed one of the approved IDs and those who didn’t. This carried through to access to the geographically scattered department of drivers’ services offices where one could obtain a license or state ID, the lack of public transportation to these facilities, and the racial disparities in ownership of private vehicles. Based on their analysis and data, the DoJ staff attorneys blocked Georgia from implementing this law. Within one day, however, they were overruled by a Bush political appointee.

Since 2007, then, a proven racially discriminatory voter ID law has stalked Georgians’ access to the ballot box.

This was followed by the Republican secretary of state, Karen Handel, who left virtually no stone unturned to suppress the vote before the historic 2008 election. She touted the voter ID law as one of her “most important accomplishments” then racially dog-whistled and lied to her Republican followers later on that she “fought President Obama to implement photo ID and won”, although he clearly was not in the White House in 2005. She purged thousands of voters from the books supposedly because they were ineligible immigrants, who had somehow snuck on to the rolls and threatened the integrity of Georgia’s elections. But the driver’s license database she used to identify 4,700 people did not update automatically when someone gained their US citizenship. Although the courts repeatedly ruled against her, Handel defiantly and repeatedly ignored the rulings and blocked thousands of Americans from voting by keeping them off the rolls.

With Karen Handel as secretary of state, democracy was in trouble. Then it got worse.

Brian Kemp was appointed secretary of state in 2010 to replace her when she moved into the US House of Representatives. Kemp continued Handel’s destructive policies but he only came into the national spotlight this year because of his gubernatorial campaign and vested self-interest in implementing egregious voter roll purges, including eliminating 10.6% of registered voters since 2016. As a recent lawsuit noted: “Kemp would wait until just before his own elections to remove hundreds of thousands of voters.” In 2014, he purged more than 250,000 voters; in 2017 and 2018, during his run for governor, 665,000 were wiped from the rolls. “In a single night in July 2017, he struck over 500,000 people from the voter rolls,” causing the Atlanta Journal-Constitution to label it “the largest mass disenfranchisement in U.S. history”.

Kemp has also been aggressive about keeping would-be voters from even getting on the rolls by holding 53,000 voter registration cards in abeyance (70% of which were from African Americans), while running for governor against a black woman. All of this was compounded by the massive failures on election day in heavily diverse or predominantly African American districts, including voting machines without power cords, an inadequate number of provisional ballots, and equipment that didn’t arrive at the polls until 5pm.

It was as if Kemp, who refused to step down as secretary of state while overseeing the election where he was running for governor, was playing a game of hangman with democracy.

Georgia is now faced with a runoff election for a new secretary of state because none of the candidates gained 50% of the vote during the midterm. Republican Brad Raffensperger has Donald Trump’s endorsement because the candidate will “work closely with @BrianKempGA”. That means democracy is still on the gallows.

Raffensperger, who bills himself as “the conservative who means it,” promises to make Georgia “safer”. Raising the unproven specter of undocumented immigrants stealing elections, which was the same scaremongering imagery Kemp floated during the gubernatorial campaign, Raffensperger promises to “strengthen voter ID” in Georgia so “that only legal American citizens should vote”. He won’t stop there, though. He also vows to continue to keep the voter rolls “clean”, which in conservative-ese means purge, purge, purge, ostensibly “to ensure that only legal citizens can vote”.

Despite the repeated claims by Handel, Kemp, and now Raffensperger, however, there is no evidence that ineligible immigrants are actually flooding the polling booths. The charge, nonetheless, has proven to be a smooth, get-around-the-15th-amendment way of targeting African Americans, Latinos, and Asians, who tend to vote for Democrats and comprise nearly 40% of the state’s population.

That systematic, ongoing disfranchising work, especially on the part of Georgia’s secretaries of state and those vying for the position, is democracy’s death rattle and portends all of the ills, like during the era of Jim Crow, that come from denying American citizens their basic rights.

Democracy, however, requires a secretary of state that believes in democracy. And, Georgia needs democracy.

Carol Anderson is the Charles Howard Candler professor of African American Studies at Emory University and the author of White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide and One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression is Destroying Our Democracy. She is also a Guardian US columnist





