A North Carolina county voted to ban Coca-Cola vending machines in county buildings in response to the company condemning Georgia’s voting integrity law.
“Yes, we are trying to cancel Coca-Cola,” Eddie Harris, the longest-serving commissioner in Surry County, said. “To use their tactics against them.”
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“The left-wing in America, they defund. They boycott. They cancel. They tear down statues. All sorts of egregious actions,” Harris told WXII, a local news outlet. “The expectation from them is that the opposing political side will cower in the corner. We are supposed to accept that. It is supposed to be OK. It is not OK.”
In a letter to Coca-Cola, Harris wrote that “millions of Americans” believed the 2020 election was not held in a “fair manner and that more voter fraud will occur in the future if elections are not more closely monitored and regulated.”
Harris added that he “really” doesn’t know if former President Donald Trump lost the election, saying that “even if he did lose, I don’t think anyone has any confidence in that.”
Coca-Cola attracted fierce backlash after the company condemned Georgia’s Republican-backed voting law earlier this year. The bill extended Georgia’s early voting period to 17 days, shortened the period of time in which a voter is able to request a mail-in ballot, and extended voter ID requirements to include mail-in ballots.
“We want to be crystal clear and state unambiguously that we are disappointed in the outcome of the Georgia voting legislation,” Coca-Cola said in an April 1 statement of the law.
The most controversial element of the bill, which was signed into law by Georgia’s Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, was a ban on political or voting rights groups providing food and water to voters in line.
Coca-Cola was far from the only corporation to weigh in on the matter. Major League Baseball moved the All-Star Game from Atlanta to Denver. Patagonia released a statement calling the law part of a “new wave of Jim Crow bills” and said that it demonstrated that “democracy is under attack.”
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Civic Alliance released a letter signed by dozens of CEOs, including Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, which claimed the bill would result in “longer lines at the polls” and “reduce access to secure ballot dropboxes.”
“Representatives from our local bottler have reached out to the county commissioners, and they look forward to continuing their productive conversations with those officials,” Coca-Cola told the Washington Examiner.
