Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger still has a little bit of a bone to pick with Curb Your Enthusiasm star-creator Larry David over the show’s depiction of his state’s ban on giving voters food or water.
In the first episode of Curb’s final season, David invoked Georgia’s newly passed 2021 law as he is shown getting arrested after giving his friend Leon’s aunt a bottle of water as she waited in line to vote. “That’s barbaric, what kinda law is that, are you serious?” David says as he’s being taken away by two cops. The subsequent trial against David’s character extends throughout the show’s final season.
During an interview on the New Yorker’s Radio Hour podcast this week, Raffensperger instructed David to “clean up your own house before you start picking on Georgia,” citing New York’s similar state law which also prohibits distributing food and water to waiting voters. He also mistakenly referred to New York as David’s home when he has actually lived in California for decades.
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The Secretary of State had previously reached out to David with a cheeky letter after viewing the episodes, writing, “We’d like to congratulate you on becoming the first, and to our knowledge, only person arrested for distributing water bottles to voters within 150 feet of a polling station.”
“I told him basically, ‘I’m sorry that he didn’t get a more warm welcome and VIP treatment that some celebrities and athletic stars get when they spend a few times—a few hours in Fulton County jail,” Raffensperger told The New Yorker’s David Remnick on Radio Hour, describing the note he sent.
He went on to describe some of the issues he had with David’s depiction of the voter law. “I’m sure he enjoyed that and I enjoyed [writing] a letter back to him,” Raffensperger said. “But here’s really the fact about it, this is what’s really crazy—is that in New York state, you cannot give anyone a bottle of water within the 150 foot zone” of a voting location.
He also defended the law itself, saying, “In Georgia what we found though, is it wasn’t the water issue, it was really politicking issues. People were electioneering within the 100 foot zone. They grab a bottle of water, but then they’re coming in blazin’ with their t-shirts and you know what cause they’re supporting, and they’re there trying to quote, ‘touch’ voters one more time before they go in to vote.”
“Just leave people alone,” he advised. “Let people make their own decisions. And so that’s really why we wanted to clarify that with state law.”
Ultimately though, he drove home his point that David should, essentially, mind his own business. “Maybe next year David would like to go up to upstate New York and talk about their laws,” Raffensperger added, “That’s his home state you know. Clean up your own house before you start picking on Georgia. We have shown that we have fair, honest and accurate elections.”
Larry David may have been born in Brooklyn but has lived in Southern California for the past several decades.
