It was already clear after Georgia’s primary election set new turnout records this spring, but it bears repeating once again: Democrats don’t tell the truth about voting rights.
Gubernatorial nominee Stacey Abrams and a variety of other Peach State Democrats got their entire national party worked up over Georgia’s new voting law last year. They framed the state’s new post-COVID-19 voting reforms as a problem so large and so grave that they called for a boycott of their own state. They invoked lynchings and slavery. And their campaign of intimidation was not just based on faulty predictions — it was based on multiple knowingly false claims.
FIRST DAY OF EARLY VOTING IN GEORGIA SHATTERS PREVIOUS MIDTERM RECORD
Democratic activists went to great lengths to plant stories in the media, which lazy journalists dutifully filed, claiming that Georgia’s new voting law was a new attempt to suppress the black vote.
These Democrats, ranging from local activists all the way up to Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) and President Joe Biden, made multiple demonstrably false claims about the content of the law, even though its text was available online the entire time.
For example, they claimed that this law would shorten voting hours, which was false. They claimed it banned so-called drop boxes, which were actually illegal already, when, in fact, it mandated properly secured drop boxes under 24-hour surveillance in all 159 Georgia counties. They claimed, without credible evidence, that voting ID requirements are discriminatory. In reality, the law used voter ID to replace the highly subjective and unfair process of signature-matching on absentee ballots.
They claimed, falsely, that the law would ban giving water to people waiting in line to vote. They claimed it would limit the period for requesting absentee ballots, which it did — but the limit was created to prevent last-second requests. It is not even slightly unreasonable to make people request absentee ballots more than 11 days before Election Day. As Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, calmly described at the time, the existing system was actually causing people to be disenfranchised because they were not getting the ballots in time to vote.
With this much-maligned law, Georgia’s legislature had actually made voting more accessible to its citizens than it had been previously. They also made voting more accessible than it is in New York, New Jersey, Biden’s Delaware, and a variety of other states that Democrats would never try to pretend are Jim Crow states. Georgia legislators had actually expanded early voting and made it easier for almost anyone in the state to cast a valid vote.
And now, once again, the results are speaking for themselves. Raffensperger announced on Tuesday that Georgia voters just set a new record for first-day early voting in a midterm election, with nearly twice as many people voting on Monday as had done so on the first day of early voting in 2018. Georgians are on pace to set a new record for midterm turnout in 2022 and are voting at levels that rival turnout for the 2020 presidential election.
If anybody is trying to suppress the vote, they are doing a pretty lousy job of it. But of course, this was also true in 2018, another extremely high-turnout election whose results Democrats still deny.
The Democrats’ falsehoods about Georgia’s election law were especially damaging given the historical context. They were designed to spread misleading and highly sensitive characterizations given the lengthy history of racial voter suppression by Southern Democrats for nine decades between Reconstruction and the civil rights era.
And they were not even a little bit subtle about what they were doing. Biden himself called this law — again, a law that makes voting easier than it is in Delaware — “Jim Crow on steroids.” Biden even said it made “Jim Crow look like Jim Eagle,” whatever that is supposed to mean. He shamefully joined in Abrams’s calls for a boycott of Georgia and specifically called on the MLB to move its 2021 All-Star Game out of Atlanta, which it did. Various major corporations with a presence in Georgia were also pressured into taking a stand against the new legislation, which many of them did without even bothering to look at it — some corporate officials even admitted as much.
Again, this was not just some mistaken prediction about what this law might do. It was a very deliberate, malicious effort to create a false national narrative about democracy being under attack — a narrative that Democrats have tried to carry further forward with their shambolic Jan. 6 hearings. It was created and implemented with malice aforethought and deep political calculation with no concern at all for how all such lies would deepen political divisions and racial distrust within Georgia and the nation as a whole.
Georgians should be congratulated today for turning out to vote in record numbers. Voting participation is crucial to democracy, as is trust in election outcomes.
And the Democrats who embraced Abrams and her thoroughly discredited election suppression conspiracy theories, who defamed good people and harmed Georgia’s economy for personal gain, should be deeply ashamed. Hopefully, Georgia voters have the good sense to repay them according to their deeds.
