The voter suppression law Georgia Republicans passed in early 2021 is working as planned, according to an analysis of the state’s municipal elections in November. Mother Jones looked at the data on how many Georgians did not vote after their mail ballot applications were rejected and how many obtained mail ballots only to have those ballots rejected, and the results are frightening: If the 2021 rejection rates had happened in 2020, it could easily have changed the outcome of the presidential election.

A previous analysis by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution found that rejected absentee ballots quadrupled in 2021 over 2020, but it’s worse than that: Mother Jones extended the analysis to count people who did not vote after their rejection, finding that it was 45 times more likely. On top of that, mail ballots of people who successfully made it through the first step by obtaining them were twice as likely to be rejected. If the same rejection rate for getting mail ballots had applied in 2020, it would have knocked out more than 38,000 votes. If mail ballots that people obtained and attempted to cast had been rejected at the same rate, that would have been another 31,000 votes. 

The 2020 presidential election in Georgia was rather famously decided by 11,779 votes.

But there’s reason to believe that rejection rates—voter disenfranchisement rates—would be worse in a presidential or congressional election year than in low-turnout municipal elections like the ones held in 2021.

“The truly troubling aspect of these numbers is that municipal voters tend to be much more experienced voters, ‘super-voters,’ if you will, who are less likely to make these sorts of errors,” such as returning their ballots late, Sara Tindall Ghazal, a Democratic member of the Georgia State Election Board, told Mother Jones. “Extrapolating that to a much higher turnout election expected this year suggests that absent a massive voter education effort, many more eligible voters will be disenfranchised by these onerous restrictions—which seems to me to have been the point.”

The most common reason people’s mail ballot applications were rejected was the deadline, which is now 11 days before the election, rather than the Friday before Election Day as it was in 2020. That year, more than 21,000 people—including Gov. Brian Kemp, who went on to sign the law imposing the 11-day deadline—were able to request a ballot within 11 days before the election and still successfully cast their vote.

And, of course, Republicans did not commit equal-opportunity disenfranchisement. “Black voters, who make up about a third of the electorate in Georgia, accounted for half of all late ballot application rejections, according to the voting rights group Fair Fight Action,” Mother Jones reports. “Voters 18 to 29 made up just 2.76% of mail voters in 2021, but they constituted 15% of late ballot application rejections.”

This is why it is so essential for Congress to pass federal voting rights legislation. Because if you leave it up to the states, Republicans in many of them—enough of them to change the outcome of a presidential election—will try to rig their elections by picking and choosing the ways that they think Democrats are most likely to vote and making it ever more difficult. Voting rights organizations like Fair Fight Action and the New Georgia Project have done an amazing job turning out voters and making sure their votes count.

But there’s only so much they can do with pathway after pathway closed off, methodically and with partisan intent. In Georgia, voters in areas that are more heavily Black and/or low-income have long had to wait in line for hours to vote in person. In 2020, Democratic voters turned to mail voting because of the pandemic, only to have Republicans turn around and make that astronomically more difficult. Republicans in state legislatures and in Congress alike are not just okay with this situation, they’re thrilled with it. And Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema don’t think it’s an emergency.