Corporations Chime In On GA Election Law After The Fact

ATLANTA — About a week after the fact, Georgia’s corporate community has rallied against the new law that restricts access to voting.

On Wednesday, Delta Airlines CEO Ed Bastian opened the floodgates to a raft of business heads either based in Georgia or doing business here to speak out against the Senate Bill 202 that Gov. Brian Kemp swiftly signed into law six days prior.

“I need to make it crystal clear that the final bill is unacceptable and does not match Delta’s values,” Bastian said in the internal letter released Wednesday morning that made its way into public viewing. “The entire rationale for this bill was based on a lie.”

State legislation that might have cost the giant airline as much as $35 million in jet fuel tax breaks had been looming but did not clear the State Senate as Georgia’s legislative session closed late Wednesday night.

In 2018, the state lawmakers punished the airline’s activist instincts by blocking an estimated $38 million tax break when the company canceled NRA discounts over questionable response to the Parkland, Florida, mass shooting rampage.

Soon throughout the day equally condemning statements emerged from Atlanta-based Coca-Cola, UPS, Home Depot and Porsche, and other companies from outside the state including Bank of America, Merck, Cisco, BlackRock, JPMorgan Chase, Microsoft, American Express, Facebook, ViacomCBS, and Citigroup, as CNBC reported.

“We are disappointed in the outcome of the Georgia voting legislation,” Coca-Cola Chairman and CEO James Quincey said in a statement, that pointed to the company’s efforts to work with Georgia Assembly members at the outset of plans for this law.

Home Depot chimed in with a vaguely-worded statement to Business Insider saying, “We believe that all elections should be accessible, fair, and secure and support broad voter participation.”

The Metro Atlanta Chamber cited efforts to engage lawmakers that resulted in the law codifying drop boxes, establishing poll watcher training and endeavoring to provide free state ID's to all Georgians. Still, Chamber President and CEO Katie Kirkpatrick last week said “concerns remain in our region and across the state with aspects of SB 202” without offering specifics.

UPS, headquartered in Sandy Springs, also noted its efforts to engage lawmakers prior to the bill’s final formation and pointed to the Chamber's comments in vowing to “stand ready to continue to help in ensuring every Georgia voter has the ability to vote.”

Porsche Cars North America operates from Atlanta. The company’s statement released Wednesday said “equal access to the polls for every voter is core to a democracy.”

Merck CEO Kenneth Frazier was among 72 Black corporate heads who signed onto an open letter condemning the law which, among other things puts limited access to absentee ballot drop boxes, reduces mandatory polling hours, cuts the time for requesting absentee ballots, and prohibits giving food or water to people waiting in lines — which have been excessively long in Black and Brown communities — within 150 feet of polling places.

Frazier, whose company is based in New Jersey, admitted that he didn’t initially focus on the fervor about the election bills as they were being debated in the media.

“When the law passed, I started paying attention,” he told the New York Times on Wednesday.

Last month voting rights advocates began calling out corporations like Coca-Cola, Delta, and UPS which donated money to early versions of what would become HB 202. And immediately following the bill’s passage into law, the NAACP, Southern Poverty Law Center, and ACLU each filed lawsuits against Georgia seeking to combat the restrictions in the legislation.

In his remarks upon signing the bill, Kemp showed some anticipation for this reaction, saying activist groups would “threaten to boycott, sue, demonize and team up with their friends in the national media to call me everything in the book.”

Wednesday, he fired back at the varying degrees of corporate response.

“I would encourage these CEOs to look at other states that they’re doing business in and compare what the real facts are to Georgia, and I think their focus will need to be on other places and not here,” Kemp said in an interview with CNBC.

Meanwhile, to Kemp’s point, boycotts are being considered. Major League Baseball Players Association executive director Tony Clark told the Boston Globe that players expect to have a conversation about whether to move pro baseball’s 2021 All-Star Game, scheduled to be played at Truist Park in July, to another state.

President Joe Biden, who already earned four “Pinocchios” from the Washington Post by mischaracterizing parts of the bill when he criticized it last week, on Wednesday told ESPN’s Sage Steele that he would “strongly support” an All-Star Game move out of Atlanta.

As media professionals who descend upon Georgia for its generous entertainment tax credits debate boycotting the state and taking industry jobs with their projects, film and TV mogul Tyler Perry - whose Tyler Perry Studios are in the heart of Atlanta - offered a different suggestion in a statement to WSB-TV.

“I'm resting my hope in the (Department of Justice) taking a hard look at this unconstitutional voter suppression law that harkens to the Jim Crow era,” Perry said. “As some consider boycotting, please remember that we did turn Georgia blue and there is a gubernatorial race on the horizon — that's the beauty of a democracy.”

In a Savannah Morning News op-ed, voting rights activist and former Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams said boycotting had its place in efforts to lobby for legislative change. But she encouraged corporations now speaking up to consider directing that energy to combating similar legislation awaiting other states, and to supporting the federal For the People Act and John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act (U.S. House Resolution 1 and H.R. 4, respectively).

H.R. 1, which has passed the U.S. House, proposes measures like national automatic voter registration and no-excuse absentee voting. And H.R. 4 will restore the Voting Rights Act requiring the Justice Department to approve changes to voting laws in states with histories of disenfranchising marginalized communities.

“I ask like-minded Americans to hold corporations to their professed values — by measuring their actions and demanding they stand with us,” she said.