As a minister and an advocate, I’ve worked on voter registration drives and helped local leaders ensure fair elections all across Georgia, from Albany to Atlanta to Augusta. No matter where Georgia voters live, what we look like, or what we do for a living, we know that our freedom to vote is the foundation of a morally accountable government that serves us all.

Another thing all our communities have in common is that we’re busy. Georgians work an average of 41.9 hours per week and spend 28.2 minutes each way traveling to and from work, according to federal statistics. And for parents and caregivers, keeping up with school, daycare, extracurricular activities and medical appointments is practically a second job.

No one expects life to be easy, but we do expect our elected officials to make election laws that work practically for Georgia families’ everyday lives. Unfortunately, some politicians in the state capitol are trying to make it harder for busy working Georgians to exercise our sacred freedom to vote. SB 367, currently under consideration in the Georgia Senate, altogether eliminates ballot drop boxes at polling places.

A parent balancing a busy job, the pickup line at school, and heavy traffic cannot stand in the multi-hour polling place lines that disgrace our state and disproportionately impact Black communities every Election Day. Nor should anyone else be expected to put the rest of their daily responsibilities on hold to cast a ballot. Drop boxes offer working Georgia voters a simple, secure, practical means to exercise their constitutional rights. Our legislators and state election officials should be massively expanding their availability, not taking them away. Making voting a more time-consuming, less flexible, less accessible process for working people is out of touch with our lives in the real world, and it’s wrong.

As a grandmother, a minister, and an organizer, I’ve learned over the years that well-run church events, elections, and family functions have common threads. They all require planning with people’s practical needs in mind, adapting to changing circumstances that are beyond our control, and above all a commitment to inclusion. When politicians seek to take away a secure voting method that fulfills these principles, we must scrutinize their judgment and intentions.

A frequent rationale for erecting roadblocks to voting is a purported concern for popular perceptions of election integrity. While suspicions of insecurity exist in the current climate of misinformation, we cannot allow falsehoods and fears to curb our real-world access to the ballot. Taking a secure and practical voting method away from a busy working dad in Gwinnett County because someone in Macon believes a conspiracy theory puts one person’s delusions above his neighbor’s rights. That’s not equality. That’s not freedom. Let’s not forget that fear of voter fraud was invoked to justify disenfranchising generations of Black people under Jim Crow.

In these times of political division, deep disagreements are a fact of life that will take hard work to resolve. But one thing even the staunchest conservative and boldest liberals can agree on is the need for accountable government. None of us want to be governed by politicians who are immune to the will of the voters. So we all need to demand that our elected leaders reject laws that dilute our practical ability to remove them from power.

Min. Shavonne Williams
Georgia Values Action
Hephzibah, GA