Major League Baseball moves All-Star Game and draft from Georgia in protest of proposed voting restrictions

Georgia’s Republican legislature has moved to make voting more difficult after the GOP suffered narrow loses in the state during the 2020 election

Fans wait for autographs ahead of the 2016 MLB All-Star Game in San Diego, California. ((Photo by Harry How/Getty Images))

Major League Baseball announced on Friday it will be relocating its widely watched All-Star Game and league draft from the city of Atlanta, saying the move is in protest of a recently signed law from Republicans in the Georgia legislature that will restrict voting access.

“Over the last week, we have engaged in thoughtful conversations with Clubs, former and current players, the Players Association, and The Players Alliance, among others, to listen to their views,” MLB commissioner Rob Manfred said in a statement to ESPN. “I have decided that the best way to demonstrate our values as a sport is by relocating this year’s All-Star Game and MLB Draft.”

The commissioner said the league “fundamentally supports voting rights for all Americans and opposes restrictions to the ballot box.”

Last week, the state’s Republican-controlled government passed a bill with a number of provisions that experts say will make it harder for people in dense urban areas to vote. This population tends to skew disproportionately Democratic and Black.

Among the provisions in the law are strict new ID requirements, a shortened window to request absentee ballots, and banning election officials from sending out mail-in ballots to all voters. One portion makes it a potential misdemeanor to offer food or water to people waiting in lines at polling places.

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During the 2020 election, President Biden beat Donald Trump in Georgia by just under 12,000 votes, and the state sent a pair of Democrats to the Senate for the first time in decades. Many credited historic Black turnout, and the efforts of voting rights advocate Stacey Abrams, a Black woman and former gubernatorial candidate, with bringing thousands of new voters into the fold ahead of the contest.

Following the 2020 contest, the state became the locus of nationwide conspiracies from Republicans about the essentially non-existent phenomenon of voter fraud, even though Georgia’s election results were checked and re-checked in multiple recounts and audits.

Mr Trump repeatedly tried to pressure election officials in Georgia to change the outcome, telling Georgia’s Republican secretary of state Brad Raffensperger at one point to “find” him more votes in a recorded telephone call, which is now under investigation by Atlanta prosecutors.

Though it now has a high proportion of Latino players, Major League Baseball has traditionally been thought of as slightly more conservative and white than other pro sports leagues in the US. Owners colluded for decades to stop teams from signing Black players, and in the present day, MLB team owners donated the most to the GOP out of all the major US pro sports leagues, according to an analysis from ESPN.

But thanks to the growing influence of the Black Lives Matter movement and athletes using their platform to speak about social justice issues, leagues like the MLB have become more proactive about acknowledging the wider political context in which their sport is played.

At the start of the 2020 season, the league stamped BLM for Black Lives Matter on the pitcher’s mound in the opening game, and players wore BLM patches on their jerseys. It was the first time the logo had been allowed on the field.