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Playing a maladjusted grouch on his TV show “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” Larry David manages to anger and irritate nearly everyone he comes across, whether they are waiters, casual acquaintances or even his closest friends.
Now, after several episodes of the show took aim at Georgia’s new voting laws, the real-life Larry appears to have drawn some good-humored annoyance from the state’s top election official.
That official, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, sent Mr. David a tongue-in-cheek letter last month, gently chiding him over a story line on the final season of “Curb” that is critical of the major voting law Georgia passed in 2021. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution first reported on the letter on Tuesday.
In the show, Mr. David faces criminal charges for trying to offer water to a friend’s aunt who is waiting in line to vote — breaking a provision in the real-life voting law that effectively bars third-party groups or anyone else who is not an election worker from providing food and water to voters waiting in line within a 150-foot radius of a polling place.
After multiple episodes’ worth of attention on Mr. David’s trial for breaking the law, Mr. Raffensperger, who has been a vocal proponent of the new law, responded with the type of sarcasm Mr. David often employs.
“We apologize if you didn’t receive celebrity treatment at the local jail,” Mr. Raffensperger wrote, before offering a wry allusion to former President Donald J. Trump’s legal quagmire in the state. “I’m afraid they’ve gotten used to bigger stars.”
Violating the food and water ban in Georgia is a misdemeanor, punishable by up to 12 months in jail and a maximum fine of $1,000, though it is unlikely that someone who ran afoul of that provision would be taken away in a police car, as Mr. David was in the show.
Mr. Raffensperger also says in the letter that Mr. David’s fictional arrest is the first of its kind in the state.
“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,” he wrote.
Republicans in Georgia have significantly expanded the authority of law enforcement over elections in recent years, passing a law in 2022 that would give the Georgia Bureau of Investigations broad power to launch investigations into fraud.
During the course of the season, Mr. David gains wide renown back home in liberal Los Angeles for flaunting the new voting restrictions — even if he did not know about the law at first — earning a date with Sienna Miller and a lunch with Bruce Springsteen.
Though he calls the law “barbaric” in the show, Mr. David’s character has not singled out any particular Georgia election official.
But in a recent interview with CNN, Mr. David was clear about his feelings for the former president.
“He’s such a little baby that he’s thrown 250 years of democracy out the window by not accepting the results” of the election, he said. “He just couldn’t admit to losing, and we know he lost, and he knows he’s lost, and look how he’s fooled everybody, he’s convinced all these people that he didn’t lose.”
He continued: “Anyway, no, it hasn’t impacted me at all.”
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