The Signing
Governor Brian Kemp signed Senate Bill 202 into law on March 25, 2021. The signing ceremony was not public. Kemp signed the bill behind closed doors in his office, surrounded by six white men in suits, with a framed portrait of a Georgia plantation hanging on the wall behind him. The only way to witness the ceremony was through a livestream or the photograph Kemp subsequently posted afterward.
State Representative Park Cannon, a Black Democrat representing a district in eastern Atlanta, stood outside the office and knocked lightly on the door. She was arrested.
The bill passed both chambers of the Georgia legislature and was signed into law in under seven hours. Its final 98-page form had not been shared with Democratic members, with the public, or with civil rights organizations before introduction. The ACLU described the process as “rushed and non-transparent.”
A Crime to Give Water
Senate Bill 202 makes it a crime to give food or water to voters waiting in line to cast their ballots. The provision applies to anyone approaching within 150 feet of a polling place, or within 25 feet of any voter in line. Offering a bottle of water to a voter who has stood for five hours in the Georgia summer heat is, under SB 202, a state crime.
To understand why the provision was included, one has to know who waits in five-hour lines in Georgia.
Who Waits
Black voters in Georgia wait, on average, nearly one hour to vote. White voters wait, on average, six minutes.
In the 2020 presidential primary, Black voters in Fulton County waited over five hours. During early voting in the 2020 general election, some Fulton County voters waited more than ten hours. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund documented that Black voters in Georgia are 45 percent more likely to wait in long lines than white voters.
The provision does not mention race. It does not need to. A law criminalizing assistance to people standing in long lines operates on whoever stands in long lines — and the state’s own distribution of polling resources determines who that is. This is the mechanism this book traces, in its contemporary form: the principle is neutral on its face and the application is not.
What Was Offered, and What Was Known
The bill’s sponsors described the food and water provision as a measure against voter influence — the concern that handing a voter a bottle of water might constitute electioneering. No evidence was presented that this had occurred or posed any documented threat to election integrity.
Georgia officials had in fact repeatedly affirmed, in the weeks before passage, that the 2020 election was fair, secure, and free of fraud. Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, had withstood direct pressure from President Trump to ‘find’ votes that did not exist, and had certified the result.
Beyond the water provision, the law’s architecture is comprehensive: new photo identification requirements for absentee ballots, replacing a signature-match system that had functioned reliably, in a state where communities of color and lower-income voters are less likely to hold the required ID; and severe restrictions on ballot drop boxes, limiting them to early voting locations, requiring them to be indoors and staffed.
The NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the ACLU, the Southern Poverty Law Center and others filed federal challenges under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. President Biden called the law “Jim Crow in the 21st century.”