‘No Middle Ground’: Black Business Execs Urge Corporate America To Oppose Voting Restrictions

WASHINGTON, DC - MARCH 10: Chairman and CEO of Merck & Co. Kenneth Frazier (R) speaks as Chairman and CEO of Johnson & Johnson Alex Gorsky (L) listens during an event at the South Court Auditorium of the Eise... WASHINGTON, DC - MARCH 10: Chairman and CEO of Merck & Co. Kenneth Frazier (R) speaks as Chairman and CEO of Johnson & Johnson Alex Gorsky (L) listens during an event at the South Court Auditorium of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building March 10, 2021 in Washington, DC. President Biden announced that the government will purchase 100 million more doses of the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images) MORE LESS
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A group of 72 Black business leaders are calling on companies to publicly oppose a series of bills being advanced by Republicans in at least 43 states that could dramatically curb access to the ballot box. 

The New York Times reported on Wednesday that Black corporate executives are rallying around a letter that pushes back on a Georgia law that voting rights advocates have said will make it harder for Black people to vote.

“There is no middle ground here,” Kenneth Chenault, a former chief executive of American Express and one of the letter’s organizers told the Times. “You either are for more people voting, or you want to suppress the vote.”

The letter — which urges corporate America to publicly oppose new laws that would restrict the rights of voters  — comes after major Atlanta-based corporations, including Coca-Cola and Home Depot, failed to formally condemn the bills restricting voting rights. 

The letter’s powerhouse group of signers include Roger Ferguson Jr., CEO of TIAA; Mellody Hobson and John Rogers Jr., the co-chief executives of Ariel Investments; Robert Smith, CEO of Vista Equity Partners; and Raymond McGuire, a former Citigroup executive who is running for New York City Mayor.

Also among the letter’s long list of supporters were Richard Parsons, a former chairman of Citigroup and chief executive of Time Warner, and Tony West, the chief legal officer at Uber. 

“Georgia is the leading edge of a movement all around this country to restrict voting access,” Merck CEO Kenneth Frazier, who also led the letter effort, told CNBC in an interview on Wednesday. He called the restrictions “a prototype for a lot of bad laws.”

The debate about Georgia’s overhaul of voting rights has taken center stage in a national debate in recent weeks, with President Joe Biden even weighing in and calling the bill “Jim Crow in the 21st century.” 

The legislation, which was signed into law by Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R)  late Thursday, introduced tougher voter identification requirements for absentee balloting, restrictions on drop box locations and expanded the legislature’s power over elections.

While voting rights and advocacy groups, including the ACLU and NAACP, have filed a series of lawsuits against the bill in the wake of its passage, a majority of corporations have remained largely mum on the legislation.

Delta Air Lines CEO came forward and issued a memo on Wednesday calling the final bill “unacceptable,” suggesting that it hinged on the premise of former President Donald Trump’s false claims about a stolen election.

The group of executives stopped short of calling out specific companies for their inaction, but are asking big corporations to dedicate resources to  fighting voting rights restrictions.

The executives are hoping that big companies will help short circuit dozens of similar bills in other states from being signed into law.

“The Georgia legislature was the first one,” Frazier told the Times. “If corporate America doesn’t stand up, we’ll get these laws passed in many places in this country.”

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Notable Replies

  1. “There is no middle ground here,” Kenneth Chenault, a former chief executive of American Express and one of the letter’s organizers told the Times. “You either are for more people voting, or you want to suppress the vote.”

    Yup.

  2. Political framing is about creating sellable abstractions from reality. The GOP are expert at developing a sellable narrative for policies that are motivated by racial bias. But that narrative only holds for so long as there is buy in. Corporate America isn’t buying into the narrative that the GOP is selling. Most everyone knows that the GOP is gaming the system for their benefit, and that it is rooted in Trump’s big lie.

    Support from corporate America was a key driver behind the move for desegregation and marriage equality. The courts took note. Don’t tell me they don’t adapt to public opinion and live only in their abstract worlds of legal reasoning.

    Dems still have the hurdle to pass HR-1/S-1 to create a standard baseline for all 50 states to follow to make voting accessible and easy. However, I also think that conservative courts are feeling fatigued from having to uphold bad faith GOP efforts to game the system and that many elements of the GA bill will probably not pass legal muster. What will make it easier for the courts is for Congress to set a clear standard by passing HR-1/S-1.

  3. Texas just said to these CEOs “watch us now”.
    Again it’s the legislators that are ginning up the fear of elections not being conducted fairly just 5 months after they certified their elections. Throwing a bone of extra days to vote early does not negated the other crap in the bill Kemp signed into law.

  4. Avatar for pshah pshah says:

    It would be a travesty if the heavy lifting is to be done solely by black corporate leaders. White CEOs and board members -a weary nation casts its eyes on you too, to do the right thing. Because if fascism comes, it envelopes all of us.

  5. The human has always lived in a social reality on this Planet. As time has passed, the social reality (and, thus, communication) has become more complex.

    From foragers with minimal distance between doer, teller and listener to more advanced systems of social organization, in which whatever one hears as “fact” must go through others’ (layers of) judgements of what one ultimately perceives.

    The GOP will always have an edge the more lazy and corrupt are the recipient and the systems of information transmission, respectively.

    Upshot:

    Don’t believe a Fucking Thing the GOP says.

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