For Immediate Release
June 27, 2023
(Atlanta, GA) – New Georgia Project Action Fund CEO, Kendra Cotton, released the following statement on the Supreme Court’s ruling in Moore v. Harper rejecting the dangerous ‘independent state legislature theory’ and upholding voters’ rights to the ballot box.
“Today, the Supreme Court issued a huge victory for voting rights with its ruling in Moore v. Harper. The opinion affirmed the right to free, fair, and accessible elections in a climate, especially in the South, that has fostered concerted efforts to expand partisan gerrymandering and further barriers to the ballot box. The right-wing ‘independent state legislature theory’ would have allowed state legislatures, many of which are laser focused on suppressing the right vote, to have control over how our federal elections are run—from how congressional maps are drawn to when and where voters can cast their ballots in the 2024 Presidental race. This blatant attack on citizens’ rights should have never made it all the way to the Supreme Court in the first place and proves that vote suppressors and election deniers will do just about anything to attack our freedom to vote.
The actions of the North Carolina GOP were just another attempt to assert the failed and damaging ‘states’ rights’ narrative that the South has worked to propagate since the 1800s—a narrative which only serves to protect the rights of those already in power. I’ve lived my whole life in the South, and I know that any conversative politician or political body down here telling me they are looking out for my rights is flat out lying. They thought they had a sympathetic forum given the Court’s conservative composition, but they got rebuffed just as they should have.
In the absence of the full protections of the Voting Rights Act, this ruling will provide some cover for state courts to review blatant attempts to suppress the vote through partisan gerrymandering, new elections laws, and additional changes aimed at restricting our right to the ballot box—protections that will support voters as they go to the polls this year and in 2024. This decision upholds key pillars of our democracy and provides much needed support, particularly to Black voters in Georgia and across the South, as we see increased attempts at diluting our voting power and attacking our rights to the polls.”
