Georgia Election Integrity Reforms: DOJ Lawsuit Makes Elections Lies of Federal Authorities Insurance policies

Former Georgia House Minority Leader Stacey Abrams speaks in Atlanta, Georgia on November 2, 2020. (Brandon Bell / Reuters)

The same Democrats and media outlets that condemned President Trump’s false claims about the 2020 election are now pushing for false claims themselves.

E.lesson Disinformation has reached a new level. As Foreign Minister, I have been fighting for the integrity of the 2020 elections in Georgia for months. To this day I defend the correctness of these choices, even though I acknowledge that they were not perfect, because no choice is. But with the Justice Department filing a lawsuit against new electoral integrity reforms in Georgia, lies about elections, and especially about my state’s electoral laws, have become official government policy.

A lot has changed in the last few weeks. When we announced the list maintenance of 100,000 obsolete voter files a few weeks ago, we expected the usual progressive pushback. This time around the chorus of unfounded criticism joined a group of people who viewed the removal of the 100,000 voter records from the registers as a sign of fraud in the 2020 presidential election and failed to notice – or ignore – the fact that everyone who had voted 2020 would not have been an option for removal at all.

There was also a sudden surge in new support for Voter ID. For example, Stacey Abrams and Georgia Senators Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff have suddenly become big proponents of the voter ID card despite repeated references to the new Georgia electoral law that requires postal ballot papers to be identified as “Jim Crow 2.0.” “.

The most worrying change, however, is the sudden mainstreaming of lies about the elections within the federal government itself. My family has been threatened for campaigning for the correctness of the elections in Georgia. We still do. But many of the same politicians and media outlets who praised us for resisting these threats quickly turned to promoting their own disinformation about elections when it suited their political needs.

Liberal news outlets have spread the idea that Republicans are trying to “steal” future elections. After President Trump and others were convicted of undermining democracy with false claims about stolen elections, major media outlets like the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and others uncritically promoted conspiracy theories about stolen elections on their own pages.

Abrams, the opposition leader to Georgia’s new election security measures, has repeatedly claimed that her own election – she lost the Georgia Governor race in 2018 with more than 50,000 votes to Brian Kemp – was stolen. Your entire national profile is based on this big lie. But media that have condemned Trump’s own Big Lie seem to have a soft spot for the failed gubernatorial candidate’s conspiracy theories.

And this whiplash-inducing hypocrisy about election lies has now penetrated the halls of the Justice Department. On June 25, the DOJ launched its own lawsuit against Georgia’s new electoral security law, attempting to overturn a bill that balanced expanding voter access and ensuring security.

The central lie that Stacey Abrams and the two Georgia Democratic Senators are now backing down from is that the postal voting ID card is somehow “voter suppression.” Liberals have been arguing for years with the same arguments regarding the requirement of identification for personal voting. In reality, the data shows that voter identification laws do not harm voter turnout. An Emory University professor noted that minority voter turnout actually increased after the Georgian Voter ID Law was passed.

Additionally, Georgia voters have long been able to obtain a free voter ID card from the Department of Driver Services or from the county registrars. And under the new law, the small percentage of voters who do not have ID will be able to use any of several documents that conform to the National Voter Registration Act passed by the Democrats, such as the National Voter Registration Act. B. an electricity bill or a bank statement.

The DOJ’s lawsuit urges misrepresentations of the bill’s common sense restrictions on the distribution of gifts such as food and water near polling stations following repeated complaints from individuals who secretly held elections while voters waited in line. Voters can still bring their own water. Election officers can provide water for waiting voters. And campaigns that want to make water available can also set up outside the “buffer zone” that the law imposes on polling stations (as long as they offer water to everyone and not in exchange for voting).

More importantly, Georgia had no queues for Election Day in November and January. The average waiting time nationwide was just three minutes on November 3rd and just one minute on January 5th.

Ironically, the DOJ’s lawsuit, if successful, could be described as voter suppression in its own right. Georgia’s new law stipulates that postal ballot papers must be requested no later than eleven days before election day. This ensures that voters actually have enough time by 7 a.m. to receive and return their voting slip in the mail pm on election day instead of being disenfranchised by unrealistic schedules. Repealing this provision would mean that countless voters would be disenfranchised waiting for or returning ballots that realistically could never arrive on time.

The DOJ’s zeal to lift Georgia’s restrictions on outside-district elections will also result in more disenfranchised voters. Voters in Georgia are only allowed to legally participate in races held in their district. As a result, Georgians attempting to cast a vote outside of their district will lose the ability to vote for their district-specific local officials. The new law requires election officials to send voters to their correct constituency instead of depriving them of the right to vote, except during the last two hours of election day when time is short.

Contrary to what the media said, the new Georgia bill was the first time postal voting boxes were anchored in state law. The mailboxes had been approved in an emergency due to COVID-19, but that approval expired after the Senate runoff elections in January. Thanks to the new law, every county must have at least one mailbox for future elections.

Depending on how a judge decides, the DOJ’s efforts to attack the prudent election integrity measures in relation to ballot boxes could result in postal ballot boxes being completely removed from Georgian law.

For these and many other reasons, I will fight this lawsuit, and I intend to win.

In an effort to portray Georgia’s new electoral law as Jim Crow 2.0, the Biden Justice Department operationalized the lies and misrepresentations about the law – and made electoral disinformation official federal policy. This is a tragedy for our country.

I opposed the lies about the elections in Georgia when they were politically unpopular, despite threats against my family and co-workers. I did it because I knew that standing up for truth and integrity was paramount. Although the media and the Justice Department decided to spread the same election lies they condemned months ago, I have never wavered in my defense of the truth and integrity of the elections in Georgia. I don’t intend to start now.