Surry County, North Carolina officials have banned Coca-Cola vending machines from all their government buildings due to the company’s recent political message. Coca-Cola publicly opposed strict new voting laws in the company’s home state of Georgia, and Surry County Commissioner Eddie Harris was not happy. He sent an open letter to Coke CEO James Quincy, which was published by CBS News.
“Due to your company’s support of the out-of-control cancel culture and bigoted leftist mob, the Surry Board of County Commissioners voted at their May 17, 2021 meeting to remove all Coca Cola machines from Surry County Government facilities,” Harris wrote. He would go on to call Coca-Cola’s political position “wrong on so many levels.” Like many other companies and individuals, Coca-Cola criticized the new voting restrictions in Georgia, imposed by Republican officials after Democrats performed unexpectedly well in the state in 2020.
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Harris tried to get into the particulars of this debate in his open letter to Quincy, suggesting that Quincy had personally said “a photo ID requirement” for voting was “racist.” He wrote: “Why sir, do you require a photo ID to enter one of your shareholder meetings?” He also reached for other, unrelated political issues asking why the soft drink company had not weighed in on them, such as “the placement of China’s ethnic Uighurs and Turkic Muslim minorities in concentration camps.”
“Where is your outrage of this persecution in a Communist country in which Coca-Cola is heavily invested?” Harris asked in the letter. He concluded by writing that the Surry Board of County Commissioners had agreed that removing Coca-Cola machines from their premises “was the best way to take a stand and express our disappointment in Coca-Cola’s actions, which are not representative of most views of our citizens.”
Coca-Cola gave a comment to CBS News saying that company representatives have been in contact with the Surry County officials, “and they look forward to continuing their productive conversations with those officials.” The company did not address Harris’ arguments publicly, nor give any further comment on the debate about voting rights and access.
The new Georgia voting law was made in consideration of conspiracy theories claiming that former President Donald Trump actually won the 2020 presidential election, which was not credible at the time and has been even more thoroughly disproven since. The law requires makes it more difficult to vote via absentee ballot in a state that has already been widely criticized for restricting voting access and gerrymandering its districts along partisan lines. The Washington Post published a lengthy explainer on this and other voting laws around the country this week.
