This summer, Coloradans will enjoy the economic fruits of Major League Baseball’s All-Star Game, thanks to Georgia’s controversy over how it plans to handle future elections.
In a last-ditch, good-riddance jab, Gov. Brian Kemp in an appearance on Fox News blasted MLB’s decision to leave Georgia for Colorado saying both states have similar voting regulations.
So who’s right? MLB or our governor?
One expert on voting applauded the MLB’s decision to take its All-Star Game and Draft to Colorado.
“The choice of Denver makes a lot of sense,” Priscilla Southwell, professor of political science at the University of Oregon, told Atlanta Civic Circle. Southwell has been studying voting issues for more than two decades.
Colorado has been gradually opening up access to voting for its residents for the last decade, Southwell said. It has a universal vote-by-mail system similar to Oregon and the state of Washington. It also has opened up voting centers and added early voting.
“There is a crop of states that are doing this and they’re not just liberal-leaning states in the northwest,” Southwell said. “The impulse of Georgia Republicans is counter-intuitive and not one that’s shared by Republican legislators in other states.”
Kentucky, Southwell noted, has become “much more commonsensical” about its approach to voting.
“They’re moving from being more restrictive to less,” she said. “At least they’re moving in a direction that opposite of what Georgia Republicans are doing.”
While Georgia licks its wounds over the loss of the MLB All-Star Game, Atlanta Civic Circle did a side-by-side comparison of both state’s voting regulations so you can decide which does a better job of providing unencumbered access to voting for its residents.
However, In the end, MLB’s decision may have come down to one simple economic factor — seating. Denver’s Coors Field seats 50,398 people while Truist Park in Cobb County seats 41,500.
(Header: Photo of Denver’s Coors Field, site of the MLB’s 2021 All-Star Game and Draft, Megan Ellis at unsplash.com)