A new election integrity scorecard produced by the Heritage Foundation serves, probably unintentionally, to poke the eyes both of the liberal establishment and of former President Donald Trump.
Good. Both deserve it.
Heritage’s scorecard rates each state on 12 aspects of election integrity and security such as “maintaining the accuracy of a state’s voter registration list,” “access of election observers to ensure transparency,” and “voter assistance procedures.” The think tank’s methodology was extensive and transparent, with ample opportunity for state officials to provide evidence that would correct any errors they thought they saw in Heritage’s initial assessments.
The reason the scorecard makes both Trump and the liberal establishment look bad is that the state that rates first in the nation for election integrity is Georgia. Yes, that Georgia: the one that Trump falsely claimed allowed Joe Biden to steal its electoral votes from him, and the one that the media, major corporations, and the rest of the professional Left castigated for its election law updates earlier this year.
Trump has made a fetish for nearly a year of making Republican Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp the scapegoat for Trump’s loss of the state to Biden. Despite not even a sliver of evidence that there was vote fraud and human error extensive enough in the Peach State to have taken a “rightful” victory from Trump, the former president has quite viciously castigated Kemp all year for supposedly being “weak” on voter security. Moreover, Trump recruited former Sen. David Perdue, a Republican who just months ago vowed not to challenge Kemp in 2022, to mount a primary campaign against Kemp after all.
Yet Heritage, the gold standard for conservative constitutionalism and for ballot security, adjudges Kemp and his colleague to be doing the best job on that front in the entire country. Trump and Perdue should be ashamed for peddling not just nonsense, but outright lies, about Kemp’s solid record.
If anything, though, Heritage’s report is an even bigger rebuke to the Left and its corporate allies. The media yelled for weeks, with flagrant and perhaps malicious dishonesty, that Georgia’s voter-law update amounted to “vote suppression.” The truth is that, on balance, the new law made it easier, not harder, to vote, while making it simultaneously even harder to cheat. Yet, a long list of major corporations denounced Georgia unmercifully and threatened or carried out economic punishment against the state.
The worst offender was Major League Baseball, an increasingly execrable organization that negated its contract to hold its mid-season All-Star Game in Atlanta. Supposedly acting on behalf of black Georgia citizens, MLB took an event with an estimated $100 million economic benefit from a majority-black city and held it instead in overwhelming white Denver, with its black population being a paltry 9.8%. That’s hardly social justice.
When Heritage’s objective criteria gave the voter-integrity crown to Georgia, the think tank’s researchers must have smiled at how “in your face” the ratings are to the establishment’s obsession with mythical voter suppression. Of course, many of Heritage’s criteria are opposed by the Left, which actually seems to revel in poor ballot security. Yet, that’s sort of the beauty of it: Heritage openly celebrates that which the Left and its media lapdogs detest, insisting correctly that what the Left calls “suppression” is actually a set of reasonable and necessary precautions.
Of course, Heritage didn’t set out to embarrass either Trump or the Left. The fact that its neutral criteria embarrass both, while in effect praising the worthy Kemp, is just icing on the cake for those who care about honest elections.
