Myth and reality collided on Capitol Hill recently. Senate Democrats convened a hearing provocatively titled “Jim Crow 2021” and featuring a who’s who of liberal activist witnesses, including Stacey Abrams. They likely wished for a national stage to cement their straw-man attacks on Georgia’s new voting law and set the stage for Congress to take the unprecedented step of rewriting every state’s voting laws.
They were in for a shock. After weeks spent repeating misleading and even false talking points to a largely uncritical media, liberals’ outlandish rhetoric ran headlong into a bipartisan, myth-busting barricade. For four hours, people watched Georgia’s Republican House Speaker Pro-Tempore Jan Jones and New Hampshire’s Democratic Secretary of State Bill Gardner methodically debunk one claim after the other.
Democrats on the committee charged that Georgia’s voting law is “restrictive,” yet it actually expands early voting, Jones pointed out. The majority of counties will now offer more hours of voting than ever before. In fact, Georgia offers more early voting options than liberal states such as Delaware and New York.
Jones put the lie to attacks on the absentee ID law, too. All anyone needs is a pen and a driver’s license. If someone doesn’t have one, he or she can use a free state ID, a social security number, or even a utility bill. And thanks to the new ID law, ballots are less likely to be erroneously rejected than they were under the old system of subjective signature matching.
What about the persistent charge that voters will be denied water? Again, not true: Nonpartisan officials can keep voters hydrated. Activists and campaigns, however, will no longer be able to work the voting lines with food and gift cards, just like they can’t in New York.
And while activists seem alarmed about lost access to voters in line, Georgia’s government was more focused on the real problem: the lines themselves. Local officials are now obligated to shorten lengthy waits so voters aren’t stuck in line to begin with.
This is the law the Left is protesting — the law that prompted Major League Baseball to rob majority-black Atlanta of $100 million in revenue by pulling the All-Star Game. This is what President Joe Biden says “makes Jim Crow look like Jim Eagle” and the Senate spent precious time convening a hearing to malign. To say the rhetoric is off base would be the understatement of the century.
In a letter to Congress, preeminent black civil rights leaders pointed out another thing it is: patently offensive. “To compare today’s policy differences with the literal life and death struggle of previous generations is to diminish those heroes’ struggle, sacrifice, and enormous accomplishments,” they wrote.
The Left is so willing to fling baseless allegations of racism and voter suppression for one reason: Laws such as Georgia’s are too popular and too reasonable to debate on the merits.
Voters overwhelmingly want more safeguards in our election systems. HEP Action polling shows that 77% of voters want ID laws — including two-thirds of black voters and three-quarters of Hispanics. Two-thirds of voters overall want them applied to absentee ballots, too.
Organizers cry “Jim Crow” to distract the public and stifle debate. They hope to leverage their manufactured outrage to pass H.R. 1, a sweeping bill that would replace popular election laws such as voter ID requirements with immensely unpopular ones, such as organized ballot trafficking.
At the hearing, Abrams supported that bill’s passage, yet she also claimed to support voter ID laws, measures that H.R. 1 would invalidate nationwide. Can she explain that contradiction?
Though she couched her support for H.R. 1 in terms of defending democracy, Abrams repeated her false claim that her 2018 race for governor may have been stolen. And she bizarrely asserted that Georgia’s new ID law puts voters at risk of identity theft, a baseless claim that risks scaring voters away from casting absentee ballots.
Not a single Democratic senator pressed Abrams on her own misinformation, probed whether her rhetoric undermined democracy, or examined her contradictory positions.
The Left claims to speak for minority voters, but it ignores the huge majorities that favor policies such as voter ID. Democrats claim to defend the legacy of the civil rights movement while callously trading on the sacrifices of men and women who brought down the real Jim Crow to score cheap partisan victories. They claim to stand against electoral misinformation while promoting it themselves.
Cynical tactics like these put our democracy at risk. It’s time for a change.
Jason Snead is the executive director of the Honest Elections Project.
