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Rosario Dawson, who has appeared as characters from Marvel (Daredevil), DC (Justice League Dark: Apokolips War), Archie Comics (Josie and the Pussycats), and now Star Wars (The Mandalorian), is using her celebrity to encourage the citizens of Georgia to check their voter registration status in the run-up to next month’s U.S. Senate runoff election. In conjunction with the Palast Investigative Fund, a nonprofit that conducts investigative journalism, often with a focus on voting issues such as disenfranchisement, fraud, and suppression. Earlier this week, Dawson (and Avengers: Endgame actress Zoe Saldana) provided narration for a public service announcement for Palast, and the billboard sends voters to the same website.
Over 198,000 voters were purged from Georgia’s voter rolls ahead of the 2020 federal elections, including many who were illegally disenfranchised, Palast says. He is part of a lawsuit by Black Voters Matter and the ACLU of Georgia to reverse the purges, but is also mounting a campaign to inform voters in Georgia that they have until midnight ET on Monday, December 7, to fix their registration or even register for the first time, in order to vote in January’s runoff.
You can see a shot of the billboard, provided by the Palast Investigative Fund’s Zach D. Roberts exclusively to ComicBook.com, below.
“Not sure I’ve ever seen an investigative team put up a billboard for a story before – especially with a masked Marvel actress (and now Jedi), but making sure that every person gets the right to vote calls for it,” Palast told ComicBook.com. “We’re deeply concerned that up to 200,000 people may not find their names on the voter rolls when they show up January 5th for the runoff election in Georgia. So is Rosario Dawson – which is why she filmed this PSA with us and helped us with this billboard.”
Since his 2002 debut book The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Palast has dedicated much of his career to pursuing stories that center around efforts to suppress the vote — or steal it, as Palast puts bluntly. In 2008, he got into comics for the first time, releasing Steal Back Your Vote, a magazine-sized one-shot printed by Top Shelf and distributed through The Nation and Rolling Stone. More than half a million copies were distributed that year, and the idea of the guide was to allow Americans who were being illegally disenfranchised a playbook for fighting back.
This year, Palast has another, similar comic — which he wrote with cartoonist Ted Rall, who illustrated it. You can download it for free at Palast’s website. He told ComicBook.com that the comic is one of their best “weapons” in the war on voter suppression, as it contains a guide for voters who have been purged, and how to fix it.
The billboard will stand — just off Atlanta’s 75/85 highway — until Monday. Once the re-registration deadline has passed, it will likely be changed to encourage voters to get out and participate in the runoff.