Zoe Gast, Senior
Many midterm elections on November 8th were won with very slight margins. Surprising democrat victories in Nevada and Arizona won with only 48.9 and 51.4 percent of the vote, respectively. Georgia, another recent swing state, had similar results with Warnock and Walker within one percent of each other. The difference, neither broke the 50 percent mark to win the majority. Under Georgia law, unlike other states, the winning candidate must break this threshold to win the seat. Therefore, Georgia will host a runoff election to decide the winner, just like in 2020. The state also restricts these runoff elections, limiting access to early voting and hosting the runoff without much time to prepare. This republican-backed law “shortens the window between a general election and any potential runoff to about a third of the time.” This means they only have four weeks to prepare. The time crunch challenges the election officials, and many employees are new and inexperienced. After 2020, many poll workers received threats due to the implications of the race, which caused an exodus of poll workers from the field. Even though campaigns work under challenging circumstances, they are determined to make voting access widespread.
This runoff election, though, is very different from the previous runoff. Because of unexpected democratic wins in the west, Georgia is no longer the deciding factor in the control of the Senate. A win for Warnock would still benefit progressives, with his vote possibly counteracting more moderate democrats that could side with the republicans and block specific legislature.
The voter suppression by republicans around the country is the political problem I feel most strongly about. When researching swing states in the past, I found that most states deemed as swing states are also states that struggle the most with voter turnout. After every election, midterm or presidential, we hear horror stories on the news about people waiting for hours to vote because of certain states’ lack of polling stations. Usually, the areas with a lack of polling stations are starkly one party, usually poorer communities that lean democrat. The complete hypocrisy of a country that prides itself on the strength of its democracy purposefully limiting its citizens’ ability to execute their rights makes me mad. The recent movement around the accessibility of early and mail-in voting makes me hopeful for legislature codifying specific in-person voting alternatives. Still, they are primarily on the state level. I think voter protection laws should be implemented nationally so that accessibility to voting does not depend on something as trivial as the state one lives in. Even though voter discrimination tends to benefit republicans, it should not be a partisan issue.