Well, Actually...

 There have been two "Well, Actually..." attempts at hand waving away most of the Georgia law. Nate Cohn has a "I know the price but not the value" take explaining why there is a decent chance that the Georgia law will not demonstrably effect voter turnout. Cohn waves away the most disturbing part of the law that allows the gerrymandered GOP legislature to seize control of local electoral boards and focuses on the fact that a lot of ways to expand voter access does not lead to more voter turnout - and vote suppression efforts often mobilize the very voters that are trying to be disenfranchised. Absent from Cohn's take is the fact that - you know - vote suppression is bad no matter how "effective" it is.

Yglesias (sub req) makes the case that there has been too much heat and not enough light on what the law does or does not do. He makes a case that Democratic voting rights advocates have made too many far reaching claims that have allowed Republicans to claim they are being hysterical...as if the GOP would make good faith arguments in the first place.

The question for Georgia is what they intend to do now. Local voting rights advocates do not want to see things like the All Star Game removed from their state. Those events mean jobs. Yglesias' case that this is not "Jim Crow in a suit in tie" misses what Jim Crow was. Blacks were not banned from voting under Jim Crow, they simply had so many obstacles put in their way that they effectively couldn't vote. THAT was Jim Crow and this bill reflects the idea that if you put enough obstacles in people's way, they won't vote.

One positive contribution that Yglesias makes is the idea that this law is a direct result of Trump's lies about the 2020 election and therefore proposes solutions that could possibly lead to really bad results. I'll let him explain it.

The risk is simply that in the future, GOP officials will do what Trump wanted and steal elections. The spectacular and alarming events of January 6 ended up creating what I think is an overstated sense in some people’s minds that the country is facing some kind of violent terrorist movement that might try to seize power. A much more plausible threat is just that a bunch of boring state legislators who are insulated from electoral accountability by gerrymandering will, through one means or another, assign their state’s electorate votes to the Republican candidate.

Back to Georgia, the election reform package also includes a great deal of centralization of power, further raising the risk that the GOP-dominated state legislature will try to invalidate the election.

After all, one big problem for Trump in 2020 was that he lost the election pretty badly. He needed three states to flip in his favor to win, which was a hard hurdle to cross. But suppose he’d lost the popular vote by 3.5 points rather than four points? Then Georgia and Arizona flip to Trump, and Biden’s wins in both Wisconsin and Pennsylvania become razor-thin. Now the GOP only has to flip either Wisconsin or Pennsylvania to steal the election, and it becomes a lot more tempting for one of the legislatures to do it and just brazen it out.

That's the nightmare. And the Georgia law makes this a possibility (though Georgia itself is unlikely to be a presidential tipping point state). 

I am perfectly willing to defer to Stacey Abrams on what would "fix" the Georgia law, but it seems to me that reducing the power of the legislature to possibly steal and election should be at the very top of the list. Way ahead of whether you can give someone a bottle of water in line.