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Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) changed state voting laws after President Joe Biden narrowly won Georgia’s electoral votes over former President Donald Trump in 2020. Voting advocacy groups responded and the U.S. Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against the legislation. These lawsuits alleged that the Georgia GOP in the state legislature aimed to restrict equal access to the ballot box for Black individuals, violating the U.S. Constitution.
Straight Arrow News contributor John Fortier analyzed the “over-the-top rhetoric” surrounding Georgia’s voting laws against the backdrop of the Major League Baseball All-Star Game.
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 states’ laws look remotely like what we saw in the Jim Crow South, where there was mass disenfranchisement, especially by race.
