In a fiery speech delivered on the steps of two historically black colleges in Atlanta on Tuesday, President Joe Biden relied on a number of false or misleading claims about voting reform to argue the Senate should scrap one of its most foundational rules in order to pass Democratic election reforms.
Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris called for bypassing the filibuster, a rule that requires most legislation to attract 60 votes to pass. Their push came months after Democrats tried and failed to pass voting reform and then tabled the issue for the rest of the year, with many seeing it as a losing prospect. It has no support among Republicans in the 50-50 Senate, and at least two Democratic senators have signaled their opposition.
With the rest of their agenda stalled, Democrats have now attached a sense of urgency to a pair of voting rights bills they say are necessary to protect elections — often engaging in hyperbole to do so.
Here are some of the misleading things Biden and Harris said in their appearance on Tuesday.
Harris: “We must not be deceived into thinking a law that makes it illegal to help a voter with a disability vote by mail is normal.”
The Georgia law does not make it illegal to help a disabled person fill out or cast an absentee ballot.
Instead, it limits who can apply for an absentee ballot on behalf of a disabled person to family members or someone else authorized to assist that voter. Lawmakers wrote that provision into the new law to prevent third-party groups from requesting bulk absentee ballot applications and distributing them or filling parts of them out on behalf of voters who didn’t specifically ask for the applications.
“A voter who has a disability or cannot read and write may get help when filling out the mail-in ballot application and the official absentee/advance ballot,” Georgia’s secretary of state office notes on its website. “No matter how the ballot arrives, a voter with a physical disability may get help marking his or her ballot.”
The person who helps a disabled voter request and complete an absentee ballot must simply sign their name to the fact that they did so.
Harris: “Across our nation, anti-voter laws could make it more difficult for as many as 55 million Americans to vote. That is one out of six people in our country.”
Harris appeared to be citing a figure from a USA Today analysis, written in November, that claimed to have examined the effects of 254 new laws in 45 states. Many states enacted those kinds of changes after encountering snags during the 2020 election, when a pandemic-era loosening of vote-by-mail standards in many states led to confusion and a delay in tallying votes.
The analysis characterized a wide range of changes as creating difficulties — including some that arguably have no effect on whether a person can vote, such as administrative changes to which officials are responsible for handling and counting ballots after they’re cast or new penalties for people who return too many absentee ballots on behalf of others.
Another supposed restriction included in the figure was a requirement that some ballot drop boxes be monitored rather than left unattended for the duration of the election.
The figure Harris cited included an overly-broad definition of what constitutes an anti-voter law, inflating the number of people who could see their ballot access diminished.
Biden: “The vice president and I have supported voting rights bills since day one of this administration. But each and every time, Senate Republicans have blocked the way.”
Biden framed his argument for dropping the filibuster, either completely or just for the voting legislation, around the idea that Republican obstruction has provided the only obstacle to voting rights legislation becoming law, suggesting Democrats are unified behind his proposals.
It was a centrist Democrat, however, that initially dashed Biden’s hopes of passing a sweeping voting rights bill — not Republicans.
Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin emerged this summer in opposition to the For the People Act, a piece of voting legislation that congressional Democrats pursued aggressively in the early months of Biden’s presidency.
In an op-ed for a West Virginia newspaper in June, Manchin wrote that he would not support voting rights legislation that did not have buy-in from a single Republican.
“I have always said, ‘If I can’t go home and explain it, I can’t vote for it.’ And I cannot explain strictly partisan election reform or blowing up the Senate rules to expedite one party’s agenda,” Manchin wrote.
Manchin is not the only Senate Democrat opposed to changing the rules for voting rights.
Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema said last month that she would not support even a limited filibuster exemption to pass election reform, further dimming prospects to pass voting rights bills that Biden claimed were only opposed by Republicans.
Biden: “Voting by mail is a safe and convenient way to get more people to vote, so they’re making it harder for you to vote by mail. The same way, I might add, in the 2020 Election, President Trump voted from behind the desk in the White House — in Florida. Dropping your ballots off to secure drop boxes — it’s safe, it’s convenient, and you get more people to vote. So they’re limiting the number of drop boxes and the hours you can use them.”
Biden was attacking provisions in Georgia’s new election law when he made this series of mischaracterizations about what the law will actually do — as well as a misstatement about how former President Donald Trump voted.
Trump did not vote by mail; he cast his ballot early, in-person, at the West Palm Beach Main Library – his new polling location after having changed his residency to Palm Beach.
On the Georgia election law, Biden echoed attacks on its changes to the absentee ballot process that activists have long repeated.
Georgia lawmakers responded to the confusion and delays surrounding the counting of mail-in ballots in the 2020 election by moving back the deadline for submitting an absentee ballot request. The window of time to request a mail-in ballot will now close two Fridays before Election Day rather than on the Friday before; proponents say this will cut down on the number of ballots that officials have to throw out for arriving late by giving voters more time to receive and fill out their actual ballots.
Voters can begin requesting their absentee ballot 11 weeks before Election Day.
Georgia is far from the most restrictive state when it comes to mail-in voting.
In New York, voters rejected two ballot initiatives that would have implemented the kinds of reforms Democrats are now pursuing.
By a 10-point margin in the November election, New Yorkers defeated a proposal to allow universal mail-in voting in future elections; by an even wider margin, they also rejected a proposal to permit same-day voter registration.
That makes the absentee voting rules in New York, which went for Biden by 23 points in 2020, more restrictive than those in Georgia, which Biden accused of limiting mail-in ballot access.
Georgia is one of 26 states plus Washington, D.C., that allow no-excuse absentee voting, or universal mail-in voting, for any voter that wants to cast their ballot by mail.
Eight states conduct their elections entirely by mail or automatically send mail-in ballots to every registered voter, and the remaining 16 states require a voter to justify voting by mail with a legally-recognized reason, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
As for drop-boxes, which Biden accused the Peach State of limiting, the Georgia law actually authorized the use of ballot drop boxes for the first time.
Election officials utilized them on an emergency basis in the 2020 election due to public health concerns surrounding the pandemic, but the boxes had not previously been offered to voters as an option.
The Georgia law codified how and where drop boxes can be used, solidifying the practice, but placed certain restrictions on their use, such as how many can be concentrated in a certain area. Democrats have characterized this as an attempt by Georgia lawmakers to limit voter access — even though without the new law, there might be no drop boxes allowed at all.
Biden: “It’s not just here in Georgia. Last year alone, 19 states not proposed, but enacted, 34 laws attacking voting rights.”
Biden appeared to be citing a statistic from a liberal group that characterizes even minor changes to election administration as attacks on voting rights.
The left-leaning Brennan Center for Justice, which tracks voting laws state-by-state, claimed in December that 19 states passed dozens of laws last year “restricting access to the vote.”
A look at the list of laws used to justify that statistic shows many of the changes did not meaningfully limit access to the ballot in any way.
For example, an election reform in Nevada simply updated the maximum number of registered voters that could be included in a precinct from 3,000 to 5,000.
That came after the state contended with nearly empty precincts in the 2020 caucuses.
“Having few or no registered voters in precincts is not as unusual as it sounds in sparsely populated Nevada,” the Associated Press reported in February 2020.
Yet the administrative change is one of those Biden cited as a restriction.
The figure includes changes states made to maintaining voter registration records, such as allowing states to remove inactive or deceased voters from the rolls.
It also mischaracterizes the changes Georgia made to its early voting period, claiming Georgia proposed to ”limit early voting days or hours.”
The Georgia law expanded the number of time voters can cast a ballot early and in-person to 17 days, mandated all counties offer at least one Saturday of early voting and gave precincts the option to stay open as late as 7 p.m. during the early voting period.
In fact, experts have generally agreed that Georgia’s law expanded early voting access.
