ATLANTA – The All-Star Game is back on in Georgia. But the conditions that caused its removal in 2021 have not changed.
In fact, voting expert rights say, conditions have only worsened for potentially disenfranchised voters.
The eyes of the baseball world will be on Truist Park in suburban Cobb County July 15, when Major League Baseball’s 95th All-Star Game is played, four years after the league moved the game in the wake of Georgia passing the Election Integrity Act. State Bill 202 rolled back voting by mail and other absentee ballot options and prohibited distribution of food and water to those standing in line to vote – actions that historically would have greatest impact on Black voters.
“I have decided that the best way to demonstrate our values as a sport is by relocating this year’s All-Star Game and MLB Draft,” commissioner Rob Manfred said then. “Major League Baseball fundamentally supports voting rights for all Americans and opposes restrictions to the ballot box.”
Manfred’s action came three days after President Joe Biden said he’d support moving the game out of Atlanta. Given MLB’s actions to remove the term “diversity” from a careers page earlier this year in response to President Donald Trump’s executive order against such efforts, a charitable interpretation would suggest Manfred, as he’s stated, is most concerned with complying with federal law and the whims of the current chief executive.
Yet the game was returned to Atlanta in November 2023, two years after the Braves – who’d go on to win the 2021 World Series – and Georgia politicians blistered MLB’s decision, with Gov. Brian Kemp declaring that “cancel culture and woke political activists are coming for every aspect of your life, sports included.”
Kemp struck a tone of appeasement when the game was returned, noting in a statement that “Georgia’s voting laws haven’t changed, but it’s good to see the MLB’s misguided understanding of them has.”
In returning the game to Georgia, Manfred leaned into the host team’s chops, if you will, while striking an apolitical tone.
“I’ve said it before, we wanted to bring an All-Star Game back to Atlanta,” Manfred said at the owners’ meetings in Arlington, Texas. “I made a decision in 2021 to move the event and I understand, believe me, that people had then and probably still have different views as to the merits of that decision.
“What’s most important is that the Atlanta Braves are a great organization. Truist Park and The Battery are gems in terms of the facilities, and Atlanta and Georgia have been great markets for us for a very, very long time. Atlanta deserves an All-Star Game, and we’re really looking forward to being there in 2025.”
Georgia voting laws: Black turnout was depressed
That the laws, crafted by late former Georgia Speaker of the House David Ralston were onerous and disproportionately impactful in the first place is what will make the game’s return next week disappointing to pro-democracy factions.
“SB 202 is doing its job,” Adrienne Jones, an Atlanta-based voting rights expert and political scientist, told USA TODAY Sports. “Kemp and Ralston and others wanted to present that as a democratizing law, when many would argue that it’s exactly the opposite. Because of SB 202 and other practices and laws that have occurred in the state, it gives them room to maintain and expand laws – without the criticism that was coming from the left in 2021, when they moved the All-Star Game.
“It’s allowed them more room to do what they wanted to do, anyway. And today, it’s an atmosphere where small changes can be made in perpetuity.”
In 2021, the same year Kemp signed SB 202 into law, Republican lawmakers drew redistricting maps in the wake of the 2020 census that did not withstand legal challenges by civil rights and religious organizations.
Federal judge Steve Jones in September 2023 ordered that the state GOP must re-draw maps for 2024 because they violated the federal Voting Rights Act by diluting the voting power of Black voters.
The judge approved a redrawn district and congressional map in December 2023, yet the political drift still resulted in inequities that would further lessen the impact of voters in majority Black areas, says Adrienne Jones.
“The state did draw additional majority minority districts,” she says, “but not in a manner that reflected the spirit of what the judge said needed to happen. They got the maps that they desired, and the more restrictive your maps are, the less people are able to exercise their citizenship.
“It impacts the value of their vote.”
Beyond districting, the tangible effects of SB 202 are harder to pinpoint, yet tend to buttress the point that its effects would be disproportionately felt by Black voters. A Brennan Center for Justice analysis of the 2022 midterms revealed that the racial gap between white and Black voters was the largest in at least a decade.
As opponents of the bill indicated, reducing the amount and availability of drop boxes would have a disproportionate impact on voters in areas like Fulton County, where they were abundant during the presidential election but much scarcer in the wake of SB 202.
Atlanta’s All-Star moment
Moving the All-Star Game was not uniformly supported by Georgians. Stacey Abrams, the Democrat and voting rights activist who twice lost to Kemp – narrowly in 2018 – in the race for governor, lauded MLB’s stance but regretted the potential loss of economic impact.
This week, Cobb County is set to capture that revenue, with Monday’s Home Run Derby and the game one night later luring visitors and a worldwide audience. Given the rotating nature of baseball’s Midsummer Classic, Georgia likely won’t see another one until around 2050.
Less certain is whether the impact on voting rights will endure that long.
“If we’re talking about the baseball game, we’re talking about this racial dispute and ultimately, we’re not speaking about it loudly and boldly,” says Jones. “But it’s a win for those who get to have the game in Atlanta, regardless of the wellness of the racial environment.”