Delta Airlines, according to its website, requires its passengers prove they are who they say they are and present a government-issued ID.
Coca-Cola officials, according to their corporate website, mandated that anyone who attended their 2020 annual shareholders’ meeting also present proper identification.
“At the entrance to the meeting, we will verify your registration and request to see your admission ticket and a valid form of photo identification, such as a driver’s license or passport,” according to Coca-Cola’s website.
“You will be required to enter through a security checkpoint before being granted access to the venue.”
But those same corporate officials apparently stop short of endorsing government ID requirements when people vote and to ensure election integrity.
As several news outlets have already reported, officials at Coca-Cola and Delta Airlines, both based in Georgia, this week heavily criticized the state’s new voter integrity law, Senate Bill 202. As The Georgia Star News reported Saturday, this new voter reform law requires, among other things, voter ID on all absentee ballots and secured drop boxes around the clock. ABC News reported that chief executives at both Delta and Coca-Cola called the law “unacceptable.”
Are both companies’ guilty of hypocrisy?
Delta Airlines’ officials did not return two requests for comment Thursday, one by phone and another by email.
Coca-Cola officials, however, emailed The Star News a statement from its Chairman and CEO James Quincey.
In his remarks, Quincey called voting “a foundational right in America.”
“We want to be crystal clear and state unambiguously that we are disappointed in the outcome of the Georgia voting legislation,” Quincey wrote.
“Throughout Georgia’s legislative session we provided feedback to members of both legislative chambers and political parties, opposing measures in the bills that would diminish or deter access to voting.”
Quincey went on to call for federal legislation that he said “protects voting access and addresses voter suppression across the country.”
Coca-Cola spokeswoman Ann L. Moore said she and other company officials had nothing further to add.
On Wednesday, CNBC anchors asked Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp about Coca-Cola’s and Delta Airlines’ executives criticizing Georgia’s new voter integrity law.
Kemp’s response:
“These business owners don’t live here and don’t know what our laws are,” Kemp told the network.
“Quite honestly, our laws aren’t as restrictive as the states where a lot of these businesses are residing. Perhaps they should focus on their own states.”
Kemp told The Guy Benson Show this week that the controversy over the law is “a manufactured crisis” and that the law makes it easy to vote but hard to cheat.
As The Georgia Star News reported Monday, Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel defended Georgia SB 202, which Democrats nationwide have described as a form of voter suppression. She said “Democrats are peddling a false narrative in order to dismantle our elections processes, and the Georgia election reforms expose that lie because the bill actually EXPANDS voting opportunities.”
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Chris Butler is an investigative journalist at The Tennessee Star. Follow Chris on Facebook. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “People Voting” by Phil Roeder. CC BY 2.0.
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