That time Stacey Abrams suppressed the vote

Anyone calling the Georgia law “Jim Crow 2.0” at the very least has his enumeration wrong. The Stacey Abrams–supported bill in 2011 should, on these terms, get the 2.0 designation, rendering the new law Jim Crow 3.0. The Abrams legislation cut the days for early voting from 45 all the way down to 21. Why? Abrams says that early voting could be “a cost-prohibitive burden” to local governments. Smaller jurisdictions, she writes, complained they’d have to cut back in other budgetary areas to maintain the longer period of early voting, and the costs of keeping a facility open were the same whether many people were using it or not. All undoubtedly true, but this didn’t stop her and her allies from attributing the worst possible motives to localities that closed down polling places on the basis of exactly this kind of reasoning — it didn’t make fiscal sense for cash-strapped jurisdictions to continue to operate under-utilized polling places. In her book, she portrays such decisions as a return to the bad old days enabled by the Supreme Court’s Shelby decision that ended federal review of changes in the electoral system in Georgia and elsewhere.