Georgia State Rep. Park Cannon, a Black woman, was knocking on Gov. Brian Kemp's office door yesterday while he was holding a signing ceremony for a new voting suppression bill yesterday that President Joe Biden attacked as "not Jim Crow, this is Jim Eagle."
Georgia State Patrol troopers told her to stop. She didn't. So she was arrested, and charged with two felony charges of obstructing them "by use of threats or violence" and a charge of disrupting the meeting. Via the New York Times:
Though the law is less stringent than the initial iterations of the bill, it introduces a raft of new restrictions for voting and elections in the state, including limiting drop boxes, stripping the secretary of state of some of his authority, imposing new oversight of county election boards, restricting who can vote with provisional ballots, and making it a crime to offer food or water to voters waiting in lines. The law also requires runoff elections to be held four weeks after the original vote, instead of the current nine weeks.
The law does not include some of the harshest restrictions that had been proposed, like a ban on Sunday voting that was seen as an attempt to curtail the role of Black churches in driving turnout. And the legislation now, in fact, expands early voting options in some areas. No-excuse absentee voting, in which voters do not have to provide a rationale for casting a ballot by mail, also remains in place, though it will now entail new restrictions such as providing a state-issued identification card.
Meanwhile, Democracy Docket, the legal team that won almost every election suit this year, has filed to stop the bill:
