Jim Crow 2.0.

That's what people are calling Georgia's new voting law,

which Republican Governor Brian Kemp signed into law on March 25, 2021.

And they're calling it that for good reason.

The sweeping new measure makes it more difficult for African Americans

and other likely Democratic voters to cast ballots.

The legislation cuts the amount of time voters have to request an absentee ballot in half.

It moves the deadline for submitting absentee ballots from a few days before an election to several weeks earlier.

It caps the number of ballot drop boxes a county

can have and requires that those boxes can only reside indoors. The new law eliminates mobile

polling sites. It makes it a crime for anyone except for poll workers to hand out water to people

waiting to vote. It makes it easier for election officials

to disregard provisional ballots and it authorizes the hyper-partisan Republican-controlled legislature

to overturn election results already certified by local officials. The new law is a direct response to the 2020 election, which saw Georgia flip from

Republican red to Democrat blue.

Georgians favored the Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden by the narrowest margin

and chose Democrats Raphael Warnock and John Ossoff for the U.S. Senate.

Now, the outcome of the election, that was no fluke. It was the result of a highly effective

grassroots voter education and mobilization campaign that was several years in the making

and has shown no signs of letting up.

So Republican lawmakers did what political conservatives have been doing since President Lyndon

Johnson signed the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

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