Sounds Like Hate Kicks Off Season 3, Exposing How Voter Restrictions in Georgia and across the Country Target Voter with Disabilities

MONTGOMERY, Ala. – The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) launched the first episode in the third season of its Sounds Like Hate podcast series today. Through personal stories of individual voters and activists, this premiere episode of Sounds Like Hate Season 3 reveals how new anti-voter laws like Georgia’s S.B. 202 create barriers to voting not only for voters of color, new voters, and young voters but for a less widely known impacted group: Americans with disabilities. 

The 52-minute podcast episode - hosted and produced by award winning independent journalists Jamila Paksima and Yvonne Latty - can be found at: https://soundslikehate.org/

This season of Sounds Like Hate will examine rights and lives of individuals who too often have difficulty being accepted for who they are, and despite decades of civil rights battles and triumphs are forced to continue struggling for the equal rights and protections promised to all Americans.

In the premiere, disability rights activist Lee Jones explains the barriers to voting the new law creates for people with disabilities: “My reason for doing an absentee ballot: I cannot stand in a line for hours without sitting down. I have chronic pain from my conditions that will prevent me from standing in line for hours on end. I do have to have some kind of hydration because of the medication that I take, I get dry mouth a lot. And just mentally and emotionally, standing in a line for hours, being in pain, being thirsty...” 

By making it more difficult and burdensome to absentee vote and making it illegal to provide food or water to voters waiting in line, Georgia’s S.B. 202 targets people with disabilities like the ones Lee has and makes it less likely she and others in her situation will have their voices heard at the ballot box. 

Gaylon Tootle, another grassroots activist with a vision impairment, commented on the state legislature’s attempts to diminish the voices of people with disabilities: “The evilness of it all, who sits around, and thinks about whether or not a person can get a snack or a drink of water?” 

The total number of Georgia residents with disabilities is over 2.1 million, making up about 28 percent or one in four Georgians. In 2020, 74 percent of voters with disabilities used mail-in ballots or voted in-person early. S.B. 202 would target these voting methods used by voters with disabilities by restricting early voting in runoff elections, creating barriers to voting by mail and dropboxes, and making it illegal to provide relief to those waiting in long lines. 

These restrictions, among others, led the SPLC and other civil rights groups to file a lawsuit against Governor Brian Kemp and the state of Georgia in March in federal court arguing that S.B 202 violates the Americans with Disabilities Act. Among the clients in that litigation is The Arc Georgia, a disability rights organization which works to empower their members to participate in the democratic process. 

“I was surprised to learn that 1 in 4 Americans live with a disability according to the CDC,” said Paksima. “This is why providing fair and barrier free access to vote, no matter what their party affiliation, is a vital right and underreported story.”  

"The people I met reporting in Georgia were inspiring. They won’t let hate win, and it’s up to all of us to support them and hear their voices,” said Latty. “At times, driving through rural Georgia, seeing the persistent segregation and oppression, and being told that those beautiful tall trees were the sites of lynchings, I got lost in sadness of what has been endured in past generations. I met amazing people who because of their race or the disability they have will struggle even harder to cast a vote because of voter suppression laws like S.B. 202, yet they won’t give in.” 

This season of Sounds Like Hate will examine rights and lives of individuals who too often have difficulty being accepted for who they are, and despite decades of civil rights battles and triumphs are forced to continue struggling for the equal rights and protections promised to all Americans.

Future episodes of this season of Sounds Like Hate will cover: the voting rights of returning citizens in Florida; the discrimination of LGBTQ foster care parents and LGBTQ foster children in Philadelphia and around the country; and the growing number of migrant deaths on the Arizona/Mexico Southern border with the surge of people attempting to immigrate to the United States. In the second episode on the deaths of migrants, the hosts will expose the concerning vigilante activity of some Militia groups in the region that includes intervening in the detention of migrants and their forced transport to U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agents. 

Sounds Like Hate is produced by Until 20, LLC, for The Southern Poverty Law Center. 

The podcast can be found at: https://soundslikehate.org/