“Curb Your Enthusiasm,” Larry David’s quirky television show that satirizes some absurd situations that in real life are not funny, brought attention to an incomprehensible law. In one episode, “No Lessons Learned,” Larry finds himself in hot water over Georgia’s voting laws.
It begins with Larry offering water to Auntie Rae while she’s waiting in line to vote, a seemingly innocent act that spirals into a legal debacle that lands Larry in court, facing charges for violating the state’s strict laws against providing sustenance to voters in line.
This may have been a television comedy, but the law was real and people do indeed pay consequences for breaking it, as nonsensical as it may seem to prevent people who are waiting in hot weather to do their civic duty, from drinking water.
Now a federal judge in Manhattan ruled on Thursday that the state’s century-old ban against offering food or water to people waiting in line to vote is unconstitutional.
The ruling is a victory for the Brooklyn branch of the NAACP, which sued the New York City and state Boards of Elections in 2021, arguing the law was too broad and violated its right to free expression.
“The Brooklyn NAACP, along with other branches, have done significant work in trying to make sure we’re supporting voters in their efforts to cast their ballot,” said the Brooklyn branch’s President L. Joy Williams, whose organization’s task is to educate voters about how, when and where to vote.
In the one-day trial that was held to arrive at the new determination, Heads of the agencies rebutted that despite the existence of the law known as the “line-warming ban”, they had never seen it enforced.
“This [ruling] now says we can also support who shows up to the polls,” Williams said.
The court decision comes just in time before New York’s state and federal primary elections scheduled for June 25, with in-person early voting set to run from June 15 through June 23.
Attorneys for the Brooklyn NAACP argued the ban was unconstitutionally vague and overbroad, violating the First and Fourteenth Amendments, meaning that the ban restricted and prohibited constitutionally protected speech.
When the Curb Your Enthusiasm episode aired, it caught the attention of Georgia’s Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, who sent a letter to David, sarcastically congratulating him on being the first person, to his knowledge, ever to be “arrested for distributing water bottles to voters within 150 feet of a polling station.”
