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Record turnout as Americans endure long waits to vote early in 2020 election
US elections 2020
A ‘pretty staggering’ 14 million Americans have already voted in the general election, according to an analysis More
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More than 10-hour wait and long lines as early voting starts in Georgia
Voters in Georgia faced hours-long lines on Monday as people flocked to the polls for the first day of early voting in the state, which has developed a national reputation in recent years for voting issues.Eager voters endured waits of six hours or more in Cobb County, which was once solidly Republican but has voted for Democrats in recent elections, and joined lines that wrapped around buildings in solidly Democratic DeKalb County. They also turned out in big numbers in north Georgia’s Floyd County, where support for Donald Trump is strong.At least two counties briefly had problems with the electronic pollbooks used to check in voters. The issue halted voting for a while at State Farm Arena, in Atlanta. Voters who cast their ballots at the basketball stadium, which was being used as an early voting site, faced long waits as the glitch was resolved.Adrienne Crowley, who waited more than an hour to vote, told the Atlanta Journal Constitution there wasn’t anything that would make her get out of the line to vote. “I would have voted all day if I had to.”Elsewhere in Atlanta, some voters reported waiting more than 10 hours for their chance to cast an early ballot.Voters began lining up outside polling stations in the predawn hours, some using their cellphone flashlights to help other voters fill out pre-registration forms, according to the Atlanta Journal Constitution.Janine Eveler, the elections and registration director for Cobb County, said the county had prepared as much as much as it could, “but there’s only so much space in the rooms and parking in the parking lot.”“We’re maxing out both of those,” she said. “People are double parking, we have gridlock pretty much in our parking lot,” she added.Hundreds of people slowly moved along a line that snaked back and forth outside Cobb’s main elections office in a suburban area northwest of Atlanta. Good moods seemed to prevail, even though some people said at 1pm that they’d been waiting for six hours. A brief cheer went up when a pizza deliverer brought a pie to someone in line.Steve Davidson, who is Black, said the late US congressman John Lewis and others had fought too long and hard to secure his place at the polls for him to get tired and leave.“They’ve been fighting for decades. If I’ve got to wait six or seven hours, that’s my duty to do that. I’ll do it happily,” Davidson said.Georgia is the latest state to see extremely long lines during the first day of in person voting. Election officials have also seen unprecedented voter turnout on the first day of in-person early voting in states like Virginia and Ohio.With record turnout expected for this year’s presidential election and fears about exposure to the coronavirus, election officials and advocacy groups have been encouraging people to vote early, either in person or by absentee ballot.Nationally, more than 9.4m people have already voted, an unprecedented number, according to data collected by Michael McDonald, a political science professor at the University of Florida.Democrats are trying to pick up a US senate seat in Georgia in a race, where the Democratic candidate, Jon Ossoff, is challenging the incumbent Republican, David Perdue.Georgia has long been seen as a Republican bastion, but many believe recent demographic changes have made it a more competitive state. A recent poll shows Donald Trump and Joe Biden in a statistical tie in the state. More
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QAnon supporter denounced for racism wins Georgia Republican primary
Marjorie Taylor Greene, a businesswoman who has expressed racist views and support for the far-right conspiracy theory QAnon, has won the Republican nomination for Georgia’s 14th congressional district.Greene beat the neurosurgeon John Cowan in a primary runoff for the open seat on Tuesday in the deep-red district in north-west Georgia, despite several Republican officials denouncing her campaign after videos surfaced in which she expressed racist, antisemitic and anti-Muslim views.She has amassed tens of thousands of followers on social media, where she often posts videos of herself speaking directly to the camera. Those videos have helped propel her popularity with her base, while also drawing strong condemnation from some future would-be colleagues in Congress.In a series of videos unearthed just after Greene placed first in the initial 9 June Republican primary, she complains of an “Islamic invasion” into government offices, claims Black and Hispanic men are held back by “gangs and dealing drugs”, and pushes an antisemitic conspiracy theory that the billionaire philanthropist George Soros, who is Jewish, collaborated with the Nazis.Several high-profile Republicans then spoke out against her. The House minority whip, Steve Scalise of Louisiana, quickly threw his support behind Cowan, while Representative Jody Hice of Georgia rescinded an endorsement of Greene.Greene addressed criticism of her comments on Twitter. “The Fake News Media, the DC Swamp, and their radical leftist allies see me as a very serious threat. I will not let them whip me into submission,” she said, without distancing herself from her earlier remarks.Greene also is part of a growing list of candidates who have expressed support for QAnon, the far-right US conspiracy theory popular among some supporters of Donald Trump. She is regarded as one of the QAnon supporters with the best chance of winning in November.She has positioned herself as a staunch Trump supporter and emphasizes a strongly pro-gun, pro-border wall and anti-abortion message. She has also connected with voters through an intensive effort to travel the district and meet people on the ground.Larry Silker, a 72-year-old retiree, cast a ballot for Greene last week at an early voting location in Dallas, Georgia.“She seems to be a go-getter, you know. She’s out seeing everybody that she can, and I think that’s nice,” Silker said.Asked whether he had seen criticism of Greene’s remarks, Silker said: “Well yeah, you know, you see it. But do you put faith in it? You just have to weigh it out.”The district stretches from the outskirts of metro Atlanta to the largely rural north-west corner of the state. Greene will face the Democrat Kevin Van Ausdal in November. The Republican representative Tom Graves, who did not seek re-election, last won the seat with over 76% of the vote in 2018.The Associated Press contributed to this report More
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A moving ‘Amazing Grace’ performance for Congressman John Lewis – video
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US lawmakers were visibly moved while singer Wintley Phipps delivered his performance of ‘Amazing Grace’ in the Capitol Rotunda for the late congressman John Lewis. A Democratic member from Atlanta since 1987, Lewis endured numerous beatings and arrests in his lifelong fight against segregation and for racial justice. He died on 17 July of pancreatic cancer at age 80
John Lewis: voice of civil rights leader rings out one final time at lying-in-stateTopics
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Revealed: US spends millions of taxpayer dollars on ineffective voting restrictions
The fight to vote
US news
The Guardian has found that millions have been spent to implement and defend laws widely regarded to be discriminatory More
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Democrats pick shortlist to replace John Lewis and face Republican pardoned by Trump
Georgia
Successful candidate will take on Angela Stanton-King, pardoned by Trump over role in stolen car ring, in Lewis’s former House seat
Opinion: John Lewis knew civil rights did not end with Obama More - in US Politics
John Lewis: Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey lead tributes to civil rights hero
Civil rights movement
Winfrey releases footage of recent interview
View from Washington: the legacy of John Lewis
Obituary: John Lewis, 1940-2020Play Video
John Lewis remembers ‘Bloody Sunday’ in Selma – video report
Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey have led tributes from across US society to the civil rights leader and Georgia congressman John Lewis, who died on Friday evening at the age of 80.
Lewis, who had been suffering from pancreatic cancer, dedicated his life to the fight for racial equality and justice and worked closely with Dr Martin Luther King Jr in the 1960s, the high water mark of the civil rights movement in the US. He became a congressman in 1987.
“He loved this country so much that he risked his life and his blood so that it might live up to its promise,” Obama wrote in a Medium post. “And through the decades, he not only gave all of himself to the cause of freedom and justice, but inspired generations that followed to try to live up to his example.”
Winfrey released footage of Lewis speaking during a recorded conversation between the two last week. Posting the footage, Winfrey wrote: “He sounded weak but was surprisingly more alert than we expected. I had a final chance to tell him what I’ve said every time I’ve been in his presence: ‘Thank you for your courage leading the fight for freedom. My life as it is would not have been possible without you.’
“I know for sure he heard me. I felt good about that. He understood and was so gracious.”
In the interview, shot to mark a CNN documentary entitled John Lewis: Good Trouble, the congressman said: “I tried to do what was right, fair and just. When I was growing up in rural Alabama, my mother always said, ‘Boy, don’t get in trouble … but I saw those signs that said ‘white’, ‘colored’, and I would say, ‘Why?’
“And she would say again, ‘Don’t get in trouble. You will be beaten. You will go to jail. You may not live. But … the words of Dr King and the actions of Rosa Parks inspired me to get in trouble. And I’ve been getting in trouble ever since. Good trouble. Necessary trouble.”Oprah Winfrey
(@Oprah)
Last week when there were false rumors of Congressman John Lewis’ passing, Gayle and I called and were able to speak with him. He sounded weak but was surprisingly more alert than we expected. pic.twitter.com/8kRRDMTvFmJuly 18, 2020
Lewis was a prominent figure in many key events of the civil rights era, prominent among them the March on Washington in 1963 and a voting rights march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, in 1965 on what would come to be known as Bloody Sunday.
State troopers attacked peaceful protesters with clubs and tear gas. A police officer knocked Lewis to the ground and hit him in the head with a nightstick, then struck him again as he tried to get up, he would later testify in court.
Images of Lewis being beaten are some of the most enduring of the era. Film of events in Selma was shown on national television, galvanizing support for the Voting Rights Act.
Pettus, for whom the bridge is named, was a slaveholding member of the Confederate army, a leader in the Klu Klux Klan and a man “bent on preserving slavery and segregation”, Smithsonian Magazine wrote.
A petition to change the name of the bridge to memorialize Lewis now has more than 400,000 signatures.
Lewis was the son of sharecroppers in Alabama but represented a Georgia district for 33 years in the US House of Representatives. In one of his last public appearances, he walked a street in front of the White House in Washington painted with a Black Lives Matter mural, a tribute to a movement he saw as a continuation of his fight for racial equality.
Politicians paid tribute on Saturday, among them former presidents Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter and George W Bush, House speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell and, with a tweet and an order for flags to fly at half-staff, Donald Trump.
Ava DuVernay, the academy award-nominated director of the historical drama film Selma, a retelling of the 1965 march, wrote that she would “never forget what you taught me and what you challenged me to be”.
“Better. Stronger. Bolder. Braver. God bless you, Ancestor John Robert Lewis of Troy, Alabama. Run into His arms.”
Viola Davis, the first black actress to win a Tony, an Emmy and an Oscar, thanked Lewis for his “commitment to change” and “courage”. In one of Davis’s most famous roles, in the 2011 film The Help, she portrayed a maid in the Jim Crow south, a role she has since said catered to a white audience not “ready for the truth” about the black experience.
Stacey Abrams, who lost a race to become Georgia’s first black female governor after voting rolls were purged by her Republican opponent, called Lewis “a griot of this modern age”. Abrams’ organization Fair Fight continues to work to secure voting rights, a central demand of marchers in Selma.
Minister Bernice A King, the youngest daughter of Martin Luther King Jr and Coretta Scott King, said Lewis “did, indeed, fight the good fight and get into a lot of good trouble”, thereby ensuring he “served God and humanity well”.Topics
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'Just ridiculous': what it’s like to wait five hours in line to vote in the US
Georgia’s bungled primary election added to cocktail of frustrations held by voters amid pandemic and protests against police brutality People wait in line to vote in Georgia’s primary election in Atlanta on 9 June. Photograph: MohammadJavad Jahangir/Rex/Shutterstock Simone Alisa arrived at her polling place in Atlanta’s Old Fourth Ward at 9.45am on Tuesday. Five hours […] More
