The University of Georgia, to protect its students, banned on-campus voting and tailgating at football games.
This obviously was a tough decision for a school ranked #13 nationally in tailgating (see ranking here).
It didn’t eliminate football games or fraternities, although the university decreed it has no control over or responsibility for off-campus superspreader events.
That horse is out of the barn anyway; like other universities that didn’t eliminate on-campus classes and activities, the University of Georgia has thousands of Covid-19 cases. (See story about soaring campus infection rates here.)
The moves were necessary to maintain social distancing, the university administration said, adding that students who insist on voting can still travel on crowded buses to stand together for hours in crowded lines at crowded voting locations in crowded downtown Athens, except they omitted the “crowded” adjective to avoid creating unnecessary panic. (Read here what a former Athens resident says about the place.)
“Those comparing [voting] to a football game should [get a life]” and “recognize that football games will be played outdoors,” the university said in a statement, adding that “we will still require social distancing by substantially reducing capacity in the stadium” to 23,000 drunken fans clustering together under blankets to keep warm when not copulating in darkened utility areas under the stands.
Tailgating and waiting in voting lines also are outdoor activities, but the university was quick to point out that have to go indoors for a few minutes to vote, which takes about as long as taking a leak in a crowded stadium restroom after standing in a urinal line.
The university administration deserves credit for recognizing that people crowding together in a football stadium parking lot to get drunk before crowding into a crowded stadium is risky behavior, even given that the Georgia legislature thinks guns are fine at these events, but what’s less obvious is how they plan to keep people from tailgating in the stands if they have to sneak their booze into the stadium.
A group of Ph.D.s reportedly is developing 6-foot-long disposable straws that fit through holes cut in masks to maintain social distancing around shared bottles.
Photo: A pre-Covid tailgate party at the University of Georgia (top left); stadium accessories (below)
Like students here unless they were to register to vote using an on campus address they would not vote on campus anyways. Many students particularly out of state students will use mail in voting anyway or actually have to take a road trip home to vote. While some students grew up and are residents of Athens they are probably a very small number of the Universities student population, though much of the faculty is likely Athens residents, and the most likely users of a polling station on campus if they can use it. Southern states are notoriously able to make voting difficult and allowing a bunch of liberal professors easy access to a polling place could be the slippery slope to Communism and we cannot have that.
Are you saying people who disagree with you shouldn’t be allowed to vote? That seems to be Trump’s and the GOP’s position.