Attorneys argued this week whether the current temporary injunction against the Georgia law prohibiting handing out food and water to people in long voting lines should stand.
Georgia Senate Bill 202 caused a number of changes across Georgia’s elections when it was passed in 2021.
Among the more controversial measures was a ban on offering food and water to people waiting in the sometimes hourslong lines to vote seen in metro Atlanta in recent elections. That aspect of the law was lampooned in the final season of HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm in which Larry David was arrested for sharing a water bottle.
Two years ago, a federal court decision lifted that ban on offering nourishment to voters waiting at least 150 feet from a polling place. The hearing this week before judges in the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals was part of efforts by the state and local boards of election to undo that injunction.
Attorneys on both sides of the issue agreed that the government has a compelling interest in protecting voters from intimidation while they wait to cast ballots. Where they diverged was in what constitutes intimidation.
Attorney Davin Rosborough, representing now defendants Delta Sigma Theta Sorority and the 6th District of the African Methodist Episcopal Church which originally sued to stop the law, argued no reasonable person would call a gift of a granola bar an act of intimidation. That at least was true, he said, of the people interviewed after having been given snacks before they voted.
“The people standing there receiving this said, ‘I understood that they were telling me the message here is my participation matters despite obstacles,’” Rosborough said.
A notable exception to that experience occurred in Albany in Southwest Georgia. There, a white woman said she did feel intimidated when people wearing Black Voters Matter T-shirts handed out food while she waited to vote. The Georgia State Election Board eventually cleared those activists of any wrongdoing.
Arguing for the state, Solicitor General Stephen Petrany argued it would be impossible to know for the person enforcing SB 202 from a distance if an interaction was intimidating or not and that, for that reason, the injunction should end and the blanket buffer zone around voter lines should be restored.
“States have been doing this for over 100 years, trying to protect voting lines,” Petrany said. “The best way of doing it is to protect the line itself and not expand it beyond that.”
It will likely be months before 11th Circuit appellate judges render a new opinion.
