Georgia Students Protest 2021 Law They Believe Codified Voter Suppression

SB201 was passed by the state of Georgia in 2021.

In 2021, the State of Georgia passed SB201, the Election Integrity Act, now Georgia state law. Its critics have widely criticized it as anti-voter.

On Oct. 19, student protestors and activists added their voices to that critique as they marched through Atlanta’s Morehouse College.

According to Nicole Carty, the executive director of Get Free, a social justice organization led by Millennials and Gen-Z students, that bill is part of a suite of “inhumane laws that attempt to suppress the vote for Black and brown people.”

Carty also told NBC News that the laws are deeply rooted in the Jim Crow South.

“It is so visibly dehumanizing to actually criminalize such an act of humanity and dignity,” Carty said. “It really exemplifies the broader inhumanity and inequality of all these voter laws that are happening. It’s not just about not being able to hand out water. Many of the most insidious components of these anti-voter laws are deep in the bureaucracy and Jim Crow. So, we’re using it to shine a light on what is dehumanizing about these laws.”

Matthew Johnson, the Georgia organizing manager of Faith in Public Life Action, shared Carty’s sentiments, in his comments to the crowd at the rally.

“In 2020, there were people standing in line five, six, seven hours to vote. There were people to come and give them life-sustaining materials such as food and water. Now, imagine seeing the problem as the food and water and not the long wait for hours. And imagine then being so bold as to try to convince us that this was about protecting the integrity of the election,” Johnson said.

Georgia’s law, along with laws passed by other Republican-controlled states, have put forth a number of restrictive laws that they allege are about fighting voter fraud since the 2020 election.

According to the Voting Rights Lab, those states have enacted over 100 laws across 30 states since 2020.

As Jonathan Diaz, a director at the Campaign Legal Center, a non-partisan legal watchdog group that has challenged a number of policies looking to eliminate voters from state rolls, told The Hill, “It’s become this game of like whack-a-mole to try and track all of these efforts to undermine election processes and to create opportunities to delay the certification of election results so that if the tabulation isn’t going their preferred candidate’s way, they can throw sand in the gears and slow down the whole process to give whatever schemes they’re hatching to overturn the results time to play out.”

The 2021 law appears to work in concert with a law Georgia passed in August 2024 that has few guidelines but allows local election officials the latitude to conduct “a reasonable inquiry” before they certify any election results.

According to Diaz, “One of the broad trends that we’ve seen is a real focus from election deniers on county election administration, on either getting people who question the validity of the 2020 election in positions on county boards of election or elected as local election supervisors,” Diaz also remarked that “the aftermath of the 2020 election radicalized a lot of people.”

Back in Georgia, Carty called for the federal government to mobilize against these laws, supporting the Voting Rights Act.

“The Voting Rights Act has been so attacked,” Carty told NBC News. “We really need federal action to actually repeal these laws that are happening all across the country. But in the meantime, what we can do is mobilize a mass against Jim Crow 2.0 and also make sure other Americans know the strategy around trying to throw out these votes inside of Black and brown [precincts], so that if something squirrelly goes down after Election Day, they won’t fall for it.”