Why the frenzy over Georgia’s voting laws was misplaced

Fans of baseball and Atlanta residents heard some good news last month. Major League Baseball’s All-Star game will be played in Atlanta in 2026. But this is not a story about baseball. This is a story about voting, and about how an overreaction to Georgia’s voting law — fueled by over the top rhetoric about the return of Jim Crow — led Major League Baseball to pull the All-Star game from Atlanta in 2021. And now, two and a half years after the decision to pull the All-Star game, Major League Baseball’s decision to bring the All-Star game back to Atlanta is proof that the criticisms of Georgia’s voting law were off the mark. And that the frenzy fueled by the incendiary rhetoric of politicians was a destructive exercise. 

Why did this all happen? First, remember that voting is decentralized. States have leeway in the way they run elections. Only rarely do we pass federal laws on voting, but at the state level, there’s a lot of legislating, and states controlled by Republicans and those by Democrats generally produce different kinds of election laws. Some favor more voting by mail, others more in-person voting, some require photo ID identification, others do not. But underlying these differences is the big picture that none of our state’s laws look remotely like what we saw in the Jim Crow South, where there was mass disenfranchisement, especially by race. 

Our states all allow some form of male voting. The ability to register and vote is pretty easy. There are differences to be sure, but it’s the right of voters to advocate for change in election policy. But the rhetoric of a return to the dark past with mass disenfranchisement is overstated. 

Second, COVID heightened the intensity of the debate. Running an election under COVID caused many states to change their voting laws and processes quickly, and we saw a very large rise in the number of people who voted by mail rather than at a polling place. In some states, Republicans and Democrats clashed as to how much of an expansion of mail voting to put in place. But even in many Republican states like Georgia, there were at least minor loosening of regulations on voting by mail as an emergency measure for COVID. Deadlines for requesting or returning ballots were eased, but in many of these states, the changes were seen as emergency changes that would only be in place in 2020. In 2022 and after, they returned to regular procedures. When states like Georgia returned to some of their pre-COVID procedures, they were accused of restricting voting. Again, this kind of argument was an exaggeration. 

Third, at the end of the day, Georgia’s election law made some changes which Democrats objected to. The return of deadlines to pre-COVID levels, small regulation of voting and registration procedures. But amazingly, the greatest heat came over the charge that Georgia was denying water to citizens waiting in line. 

Georgia indeed had a law that created a zone around the polling place where parties and outside groups cannot solicit voters, or provide them with any gifts including food and water. Some form of these laws exist in every state. They are meant to protect the voter from solicitation or influence very close to the polling place. And this was the argument that was most heard in the media, and fed the claim by Joe Biden that the law was Jim Crow 2.0. We should have robust debate over our voting laws, but the excessive reaction to the Georgia voting law should be a caution to business leaders and the American people. One milestone in the move to a more rational debate over our voting laws will be when the umpire yells “play ball” at the 2026 All-Star game in Atlanta.