Early voting has ended in Georgia. This means that at long last, the nation gets to find out just how out of touch with reality Democrats were when they denounced the state’s new election reform law.
At the time, the Democratic Party used its media tentacles to intimidate much of corporate America into denouncing Georgia’s law and others like it as “voter suppression” measures. They claimed that it was a return to “Jim Crow 2.0,” as President Joe Biden put it. It was so bad, they claimed, that it was worth encouraging a corporate boycott of the Peach State. They even got the MLB to move the All-Star Game from Atlanta to Denver in 2021.
Now, even the Washington Post, one of those Democratic tentacles mentioned above, is noticing that Georgians are voting in record numbers. The Washington Post’s headline asserts that “voting is surging in Georgia despite” the new law. The fact is, that law is probably helping a lot of additional people vote. It was a smart reform measure that Democrats simply couldn’t stop lying about.
Georgia’s adoption of voter ID 16 years ago, combined with the new measures that improve absentee ballot integrity and access to early voting, has made it easier for anyone to vote legitimately. The proof is unfolding now: At 800,000 ballots cast as of Friday, early voting tripled in this year’s primary compared to the last midterm election in 2018, and it is even higher than the presidential-year early vote of 2020.
There was never a serious case, only bald assertions by Democrats without evidence, of any significant number of eligible voters in Georgia or any other state in the 21st century lacking the identification necessary to obtain a state-issued ID or cast a vote — nor was it ever a serious claim during last year’s controversy that Georgia’s return to something resembling a pre-COVID election system, but with more generous early voting opportunities, was an attempt at voter suppression. Indeed, most Democratic states, including Delaware, New York, and Connecticut, have far more restrictive voting laws than Georgia, Texas, or any of the other Republican states that have recently passed reform laws. Several of them, including Minnesota, have similar requirements for showing proof of ID to get an absentee ballot.
Unfortunately, the national media chose to make themselves enablers of Georgia’s Democratic Party, the mendacious organization that has spent the past four years pretending it did not lose the 2018 election. Indeed, Georgia Democrats and gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams predated former President Donald Trump’s election denialism and, in fact, surpassed it in its fantastical nature. After all, Abrams lost Georgia by fully 55,000 votes in 2018, compared to Trump’s loss by fewer than 12,000 votes. In a strange homage to the Nazis’ antisemitic propaganda, Democrats accuse Trump of what they incessantly call the “big lie” for being an election denialist. Yet their own “big lie” is more than four times as big — at least in Georgia.
All the Democrats have to support their 2018 story are unfounded conspiracy theories about significant voter suppression. They continue to repeat these stories, even though they were all debunked contemporaneously four years ago. That Georgia’s voter turnout in 2018 set new records among “all major racial and ethnic groups” is still further proof that their claims are unfounded. That new turnout records are being set this year is proof of the bad faith with which they have argued all along.
The good news is that Democrats only succeeded in fooling themselves about voter suppression. Nobody else believes them.
A recent Quinnipiac poll gave respondents the opportunity to rank issues based on their gravity. As we noted the other day, every single demographic and political cohort chose inflation as the most pressing national issue — except for Democrats, who put abortion first, just 5 points ahead of their third-place priority, “election laws.” It is extremely telling that no other political or racial subgroup group shares the Democrats’ concern about election laws in any significant numbers.
Self-identified Democratic voters only care about these laws because they have deluded themselves into believing that they were robbed in Georgia in 2018. In their fevered minds, they are the heroes of racial justice amid a new Jim Crow era — either because their real lives lack meaning, because they don’t have any conception of what Jim Crow was like, or because they feel that this sort of hyperbole will encourage more Democratic voters to turn out. Or perhaps it’s all three. In Abrams’s case, election denialism has also personally enriched her.
In truth, Georgia has seen its voter participation rate grow by leaps and bounds ever since the passage of its original voter ID law in 2006. A trustworthy election system encourages high turnout, whereas doubts about election integrity, such as the ones Trump foolishly sowed among his supporters in 2020, discourage people from voting.
This year promises to feature another very high turnout midterm election in Georgia, just like the one in 2018. When the new records are set in November, it will be still more damning evidence of Democrats’ dishonesty.
