“Curb Your Enthusiasm” Had a Very Funny End, But It Got Georgia’s Voting Laws Dead Wrong
Larry David's hilarious show ended with a little bit of a misfire.
The long-run comedy show Curb Your Enthusiasm concluded this past spring, topping off a run of more than two decades. I wasn’t a devoted fan of the show, but what I did see was absolutely hilarious.
Showrunner Larry David has long been a gift to America’s community comedians (of which I’m am amateur member — I’m in a local improv troupe). Curb’s end should be mourned by anyone anywhere who enjoys a good laugh.
But one plotline that populated this final season bothered me because the satire it was sketching just wasn’t based on reality. Sorry Larry, I have to correct the record.
In the first episode of the last season of Curb, David is searching for his friend’s aunt, an older black woman voting in the state of Georgia. He has to return a pair of glasses to her.
But it turns out that she was out voting after the passage of SB202, Georgia’s new election law.
Auntie Rae has been standing out in the heat for two and half hours to vote. It’s brutally hot.
“Look what they put people through just to vote!” David exclaims.
He goes into his car and grabs some water and hands it to her. That’s when he’s promptly arrested by the police.
“It is illegal for anyone in the state of Georgia to provide food or water to voters in line at the polls
“What, that’s barbaric, what kind of law – are you serious?” David protests before he’s led away in handcuffs. (The plotline continued throughout the entire season, right up through the series finale, which riffs off the end of Seinfeld, a series which David famously wrote)
In an interview with The Wrap, executive producer Jeff Schaffer explained that “we were always going to Atlanta because of that barbaric law,” pointing to Georgia’s SB202. “Larry said, ‘This law is insane. I think it’d be funny if I got arrested for that,’” Schaffer explained.
Larry David getting arrested is always funny. But the segment, dropped into the last few minutes of the first episode, seemed as much a political protest as a joke, as indicated by Shaffer in the interview above.
But was the protest on point? Are Georgia’s black voters really suffering through hours of lines to vote as a consequence of a GOP-passed election law?
How Georgia’s 2022 election played out
When Georgia Republicans made changes to the voting system following the 2020 election, they came under harsh criticism from Democrats.
President Joe Biden compared those laws to Jim Crow (at one point suggesting they may be even worse.) But Biden was also in the midst of trying to pass his own federal voting overhaul, and criticizing the Republicans was one way to help build support for his package (which never went through).
The reality of the changes that the Georgia Republicans made was far less dramatic than what was often portrayed.
For instance, the fictional police officer in the Curb episode tells David that it’s unlawful to provide food or water to anyone waiting in line to vote.
What the law actually does is a little more nuanced than that. The changes around distributing food or water are actually in the same section of Georgia election law that governs electioneering near a polling place. The updated law reads like this:
(a) No person shall solicit votes in any manner or by any means or method, nor shall any person distribute or display any campaign material, nor shall any person give, offer to give, or participate in the giving of any money or gifts, including, but not limited to, food and drink, to an elector, nor shall any person solicit signatures for any petition, nor shall any person, other than election officials discharging their duties, establish or set up any tables or booths on any day in which ballots are being cast:
(1) Within 150 feet of the outer edge of any building within which a polling place is established;
(2) Within any polling place;
(3) Within 25 feet of any voter standing in line to vote at any polling place.
As you can see, the restriction is intended to prevent people from offering food or drink within the same distance as you’re disallowed from offering money or gifts or giving campaign material. These kinds of restrictions on electioneering exist almost everywhere in the United States, Georgia just added food and water to the list of ways you shouldn’t try to influence voters right as they’re about to vote. (To my knowledge, nobody has been arrested under this law.)
It’s completely fair to argue that these restrictions are unnecessary – you might also think that it’s unnecessary to prevent people distributing campaign material right outside a polling place. But this law is in the same spirit as that law.
Yet what happens when someone needs a drink of water in an emergency? Is it really illegal to provide them with something that would quench their thirst?
The next section of the law addresses that:
This Code section shall not be construed to prohibit a poll officer from distributing materials, as required by law, which are necessary for the purpose of instructing electors or from distributing materials prepared by the Secretary of State which are designed solely for the purpose of encouraging voter participation in the election being conducted or from making available self-service water from an unattended receptacle to an elector waiting in line to vote."
Poll workers are free to provide water for voters who would need it. The intent of the law is to prevent other people from providing these materials in the course of campaigning for a candidate.
But what of voters standing in lines for hours to vote? Many people argued that Republicans in Georgia wanted to suppress the vote of African Americans and others who tend to vote for Democrats. Considering the episode came out more than a year after Georgia’s 2022 election – where the law was fully in place – its producers could’ve spent some time looking at what actually happened in that election.
Researchers at the University of Georgia (full disclosure: my alma mater) surveyed Georgians about their voting experiences.
96% of black voters said they had an “excellent” or “fair” experience voting in the election.
0.5% – less than one percent – of black voters self-reported any problem at all with voting, which was actually less than half the percentage of white voters who reported problems with voting.
The researchers also polled voters about their wait times.
96% of black voters said they waited less than 30 minutes to vote. Less than 1% said they waited more than an hour to vote (actually more white voters said they waited longer than an hour to vote).
Less than 7% of black voters said it was harder to vote in this election than in the past, whereas 19% said it was easier; just over 72% said there was no difference.
Does any of this mean that the voting experience in Georgia is perfect? No.
But it does mean that Georgia is not the quasi-Apartheid state portrayed in the Curb episode, where black voters are forced to wait more than two hours to vote and then deprived of their human right to a glass of water while they swelter in the summer heat. (Georgia’s elections are generally in November just like everywhere else but lower turnout primary elections could be held in the summer.)
A funnier plot line
I’m sure some of you are wondering why I took the time to fact check a comedy show. The show’s purpose is to make people laugh – aren’t I being a bit uptight?
Well, part of what makes political satire work is when there’s a bit of truth to it. Yes, you can turn things up a notch to make it more absurd, but the core of what you’re saying has to feel authentic.
That’s why Get Out worked – yes, liberal white people are not kidnapping black people and inserting their consciousness into their souls. But a lot of white liberals do fetishize black people, and that's the joke of the movie – the condescending attitude that a lot of African Americans have to deal with.
So Curb could’ve gone for a funnier joke that rang more true.
Maybe Larry would show up at a polling place to meet Aunt Rae after spending hours watching MSNBC and listening to President Biden fearing that the poor woman would be dying in the heat.
Instead, he finds that she waltzes right out of the polling place, telling him she had no problem at all voting. A poll worker even made sure she had a bottle of water available to her just in case she happened to encounter a lengthy line.
That’s the joke on liberals.
But then maybe Rae is jumped by a conservative influencer with a smartphone who accuses her of voter fraud.
“Excuse me?” she asks him, flashing him her drivers license, U.S. passport, and birth certificate. “I was born and raised here, you?”
The man, who reveals himself as coming from out of state hunting for proof that the election was rigged against Donald Trump, is forced to admit he’s no Georgian and scurries off.
The reality, which is actually very humorous, is that both sides have accused the other of stealing the election in Georgia’s recent elections, but that everything’s actually been pretty smooth in the Peach State. That means that, if anything, democracy is alive and well in Georgia.
Even a men as funny as Larry David and Donald Trump shouldn’t be afraid to admit that.
Well done !
Totally agree. Good to point out the water fabrication which was explained on day one and never covered by the press who acted like it was true. But the bigger lie is the Jim Crow smear concerning access and availability of early and mail-in voting. President Biden’s Jim Crow 2.0 and the constant demagoguery of the Press made this an “alternative reality”. Simply put, the side by side comparison shows the revised Georgia voting laws provides much, much more early voting (both in-person and mail-in) than the States of New York or…………Delaware!