Apple CEO Tim Cook on Thursday joined mounting calls from corporate leaders against the new Georgia restrictive voting law and other voting restrictions around the country.
In a statement to Axios, Cook pointed to the Black community’s long history of fighting for the right to vote.
“American history is the story of expanding the right to vote to all citizens, and Black people, in particular, have had to march, struggle and even give their lives for more than a century to defend that right,” Cook said.
Cook said that Apple values the right for every eligible citizen to exercise their right to vote.
“We support efforts to ensure that our democracy’s future is more hopeful and inclusive than its past,” Cook said.
The Apple CEO’s condemnation of voting restrictions was issued a day after the floodgates opened following Delta CEO Ed Bastian’s statement blasting the “unacceptable” legislation in Georgia.
Hours after Bastian’s criticism of the Georgia law was issued in a companywide memo on Wednesday, other corporations with Georgia ties such as Microsoft and Coca-Cola came out against the legislation.
Many Georgia-based corporations had initially issued statements on the state’s restrictive voting law upon its passage last week, but fell short of condemning it.
Backlash against the corporations’ initial muted opposition to the law ensued amid a number of Black community and civil rights groups filing at least three lawsuits challenging several of the law’s provisions.
Restrictive provisions of the new Georgia voting law include new ID requirements for mail voting, limits on dropbox use and banning the distribution of food and most beverages to voters waiting in line.
Words? Nice.
Moving business out of GA until they straighten up and fly right? Better.
Words are cheap, and Republicans have grown very thick skin, especially after the last four years, to these sorts of condemnations.
If Georgia decided to pass a law decriminalizing the theft of products from Apple stores, would Apple limit itself to “condemning” that action because “American history is the story of expanding the [right to protect the property of] all citizens”?
A better question is, if that is all it did, would anyone have any incentive not to get free iPhones?
I think we all know the answers.
POC
and so forth
There’s only one way to get the attention of the Georgia government that put these Jim Crow laws into place- the pocketbook. A sustained campaign should be made to impact every sector.
They might change their minds, they might not. But at least a price will have been extracted and bad behavior discouraged rather than reinforced.
#BoycottGeorgia
Does Apple have any manufacturing plants in rural GA? Oh No. Well is Apple willing to stop selling products to conservative counties in GA? Oh hell NO. Well then this statement means absolutely nothing because white rural GA conservatives won’t give one shit at all what Tim Cook ‘condemns’. Hell haven’t you heard, conservatives hate ‘big tech’ now, they’ll be happy they make ‘Apple’ sad.
All these news stories are just free press for companies to make marketing statements at this point.