LeBron James calls voting system ‘structurally racist’ as voters in Georgia line for hours to cast ballots
LEBRON James has shared his fury after voters in black neighborhoods appeared to face unjustly long lines to vote in the Georgia primaries.
The NBA star was responding to reports Tuesday that wait times to vote were shorter in more affluent, predominantly white neighborhoods.
“Everyone talking about ‘how do we fix this?'” the NBA star tweeted.
“They say ‘go out and vote?’ What about asking if how we vote is also structurally racist?”
It followed reports that voters waited as long as five hours to cast ballots in some Georgia precincts on Tuesday amid reports of voting machine malfunctions.
The state’s chief elections officer, Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, announced plans to investigate voting problems that plagued Fulton and Dekalb counties, where roughly half the population is black.
Widespread problems included trouble with Georgia’s new voting system that combines touchscreens with scanned paper ballots in races for president, U.S. Senate and dozens of other contests.
Some voters said they joined the lines after requesting mail-in ballots that never arrived.
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One state lawmaker, Democratic Rep. William Boddie of Atlanta, said there was a “complete meltdown.”
The tumult in Georgia, a state that President Donald Trump and Democrat Joe Biden are expected to hotly contest in the fall, served as a test of how to conduct elections in the era of coronavirus.
The pandemic kept some poll workers at home, forced the consolidation of some voting precincts and prompted a sometimes confusing shift to absentee ballots.
Some voters said they were determined to participate in the democratic process after the police killing of George Floyd and the ensuing demonstrations that swept cities across the nation, including Atlanta.