Washington Examiner Liberals cry voter suppression, but Georgia proves different Translation: Facts don’t matter. Liberals will keep pushing their “voter suppression” myth, but the reality is Georgia has clearly made it easier to vote and harder to cheat.
hen Georgia lawmakers passed a popular election integrity law last year, liberals immediately smeared it as “Jim Crow 2.0.” Left-wing politicians from President Joe Biden to those down the chain claimed it would suppress the vote and spell the end for democracy itself.
Last month, those claims ran straight into a voter-participation buzzsaw. More than 860,000 people voted before polls even opened, more than double the number who cast early ballots in 2018 or the pandemic primary of 2020. As voting wrapped up on Tuesday, Georgia’s secretary of state reported a record turnout for a midterm primary.
Early voting is easy; turnout is through the roof. Does that sound like “Jim Crow”?
The success of last month’s primary is not a revelation. Instead, it confirms that the Left’s hysterical rhetoric — repeatedly boosted by a largely uncritical media — never matched reality.
For instance, liberals claimed that Georgia’s new law, SB 202, restricted voting. In actuality, it expanded the state’s already generous window for early voting. With a minimum of 17 days plus optional Sundays for “Souls to the Polls,” Georgia offers more days to vote than Biden’s home state of Delaware or Sen. Chuck Schumer’s native New York, plus anyone can vote by mail.
For mail ballots, Georgia replaced problematic signature matching with more reliable voter ID requirements. Liberals claimed this would disenfranchise voters who lack ID, even though the law allows such voters to use a Social Security number, and anyone without that can use things such as utility bills and bank statements.
Lawmakers formally allowed drop boxes for the first time, but even this was spun as “restrictive” since the state would offer fewer drop boxes than the Wild West-like emergency rollout during the pandemic.
Then there were the incessant claims that voters would be denied water in the line. Again, not true. The law requires local officials to shorten lengthy wait times and explicitly allows election workers to provide water. But partisan activists can no longer work the voting lines with food and gift cards. Are they truly worried about voters’ access to water or their own access to voters?
With a law this reasonable and commonsense, it’s easy to see why the Left would prefer a cynical smear campaign to an honest debate. Stacey Abrams labeled the law “Jim Crow 2.0,” a line used to attack Florida, Texas, Arizona, and almost every other state that has reformed election laws over the last year.
Activists organized misinformation campaigns that got lawmakers fired from their jobs. Major League Baseball joined the woke crusade and pulled the All-Star Game — and $100 million in economic activity — from majority-black Atlanta to protest a law that asks voters to show the same IDs that MLB uses for tickets at will call windows.
In January, Biden traveled to Atlanta for a speech in which he compared those who support voter ID laws to domestic “enemies” standing with literal traitors such as Jefferson Davis. Back in Washington, his fellow Democrats leveraged the manufactured outrage to justify a partisan federal takeover of elections. And when that effort failed, the president preemptively declared that the 2022 midterm elections might not be legitimate.
Cynical tactics like these put our democracy at risk. Elections work when they convince the losing side that its defeat was fair. When voting rules become political footballs or partisan wedge issues, trust and confidence in elections wane, and their legitimacy suffers.
What has the Left gotten for all of its efforts? Not much. Liberals haven’t stopped states from passing commonsense election laws that improve safeguards and protect everyone’s right to vote, nor have they made election integrity laws less popular.
In fact, support for photo ID laws is higher today than it was when Georgia enacted SB 202. Eighty-four percent of voters support requiring a photo ID to vote, including three-quarters of black voters and an astounding 90% of Hispanics.
But one area where the Left has succeeded is scaring Americans, such as 70-year-old Georgian Patsy Reid, into believing their rights are in peril. Reid, who is black, told the Washington Post that she feared voter suppression would cost her the right to vote. Then she showed up at the polls: To “vote as easily as I did and to be treated with the respect that I knew I deserved as an American citizen — I was really thrown back.”
For the health of our democracy, it’s time for liberals to dial down the rhetoric, stop the disinformation, and recognize how extreme they have become. Yet, even as Georgia broke turnout records, Stacey Abrams told reporters that “increased turnout has nothing to do with suppression.”
Translation: Facts don’t matter. Liberals will keep pushing their “voter suppression” myth, but the reality is Georgia has clearly made it easier to vote and harder to cheat
Jason Snead is the executive director of the Honest Elections Project.
hen Georgia lawmakers passed a popular election integrity law last year, liberals immediately smeared it as “Jim Crow 2.0.” Left-wing politicians from President Joe Biden to those down the chain claimed it would suppress the vote and spell the end for democracy itself.
Last month, those claims ran straight into a voter-participation buzzsaw. More than 860,000 people voted before polls even opened, more than double the number who cast early ballots in 2018 or the pandemic primary of 2020. As voting wrapped up on Tuesday, Georgia’s secretary of state reported a record turnout for a midterm primary.
Early voting is easy; turnout is through the roof. Does that sound like “Jim Crow”?
The success of last month’s primary is not a revelation. Instead, it confirms that the Left’s hysterical rhetoric — repeatedly boosted by a largely uncritical media — never matched reality.
For instance, liberals claimed that Georgia’s new law, SB 202, restricted voting. In actuality, it expanded the state’s already generous window for early voting. With a minimum of 17 days plus optional Sundays for “Souls to the Polls,” Georgia offers more days to vote than Biden’s home state of Delaware or Sen. Chuck Schumer’s native New York, plus anyone can vote by mail.
For mail ballots, Georgia replaced problematic signature matching with more reliable voter ID requirements. Liberals claimed this would disenfranchise voters who lack ID, even though the law allows such voters to use a Social Security number, and anyone without that can use things such as utility bills and bank statements.
Lawmakers formally allowed drop boxes for the first time, but even this was spun as “restrictive” since the state would offer fewer drop boxes than the Wild West-like emergency rollout during the pandemic.
Then there were the incessant claims that voters would be denied water in the line. Again, not true. The law requires local officials to shorten lengthy wait times and explicitly allows election workers to provide water. But partisan activists can no longer work the voting lines with food and gift cards. Are they truly worried about voters’ access to water or their own access to voters?
With a law this reasonable and commonsense, it’s easy to see why the Left would prefer a cynical smear campaign to an honest debate. Stacey Abrams labeled the law “Jim Crow 2.0,” a line used to attack Florida, Texas, Arizona, and almost every other state that has reformed election laws over the last year.
Activists organized misinformation campaigns that got lawmakers fired from their jobs. Major League Baseball joined the woke crusade and pulled the All-Star Game — and $100 million in economic activity — from majority-black Atlanta to protest a law that asks voters to show the same IDs that MLB uses for tickets at will call windows.
In January, Biden traveled to Atlanta for a speech in which he compared those who support voter ID laws to domestic “enemies” standing with literal traitors such as Jefferson Davis. Back in Washington, his fellow Democrats leveraged the manufactured outrage to justify a partisan federal takeover of elections. And when that effort failed, the president preemptively declared that the 2022 midterm elections might not be legitimate.
Cynical tactics like these put our democracy at risk. Elections work when they convince the losing side that its defeat was fair. When voting rules become political footballs or partisan wedge issues, trust and confidence in elections wane, and their legitimacy suffers.
What has the Left gotten for all of its efforts? Not much. Liberals haven’t stopped states from passing commonsense election laws that improve safeguards and protect everyone’s right to vote, nor have they made election integrity laws less popular.
In fact, support for photo ID laws is higher today than it was when Georgia enacted SB 202. Eighty-four percent of voters support requiring a photo ID to vote, including three-quarters of black voters and an astounding 90% of Hispanics.
But one area where the Left has succeeded is scaring Americans, such as 70-year-old Georgian Patsy Reid, into believing their rights are in peril. Reid, who is black, told the Washington Post that she feared voter suppression would cost her the right to vote. Then she showed up at the polls: To “vote as easily as I did and to be treated with the respect that I knew I deserved as an American citizen — I was really thrown back.”
For the health of our democracy, it’s time for liberals to dial down the rhetoric, stop the disinformation, and recognize how extreme they have become. Yet, even as Georgia broke turnout records, Stacey Abrams told reporters that “increased turnout has nothing to do with suppression.”
Translation: Facts don’t matter. Liberals will keep pushing their “voter suppression” myth, but the reality is Georgia has clearly made it easier to vote and harder to cheat
Jason Snead is the executive director of the Honest Elections Project.
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