Georgia election laws were reportedly so restrictive that President Joe Biden traveled to Atlanta in January with a stark warning.
“Jim Crow 2.0 is about two insidious things – voter suppression and electoral subversion,” Biden said. “That’s not an exaggeration. That’s fact.”
However, Georgian Foreign Minister Brad Raffensperger announced on Thursday that 1.13 million Georgians had voted early in the peach state, compared with 730,706 at the same time in the 2018 midterm elections.
In fact, early voting in Georgia this year is almost on par with the 2020 presidential election. Turnout in presidential election years is usually significantly higher than in election years.
Not only that, in 2022 elementary school Georgia saw an overall increase of 168% compared to 2018 elementary school.
After Georgia passed electoral reforms in 2021, Biden characterized the new law as making “Jim Crow look like Jim Eagle.”
“I’m not going to say it’s going to be legitimate,” Biden said earlier this year of the upcoming midterm elections across the country, citing Congressional Democrats’ failure to pass their amendments to federal election laws. These changes would have effectively overturned electoral laws in Georgia and 18 other states.
The President argued that there would be too much “voter suppression” for election results to be legitimate.
Now that pre-Election Day pre-election voting has surged in Georgia, the White House is sticking to its line of “election suppression.”
“What I’m saying is, you know, in general, more generally, of course, higher turnout and voter suppression can be happening at the same time,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters Tuesday — without citing any evidence.
“You don’t have to come by yourself,” said Jean-Pierre. “They can happen at the same time. But I’ll leave it at that without being able to really delve into politics.”
As I note in my new book, The Myth of Voter Suppression: The Left’s Assault on Clean Elections, logic and evidence were never a prerequisite for the left’s engagement with this narrative.
When asked, “Is the White House watching instances of voter suppression in Georgia and other states that have passed some of these laws in the last two years?” Jean-Pierre replied, “Look, we — we’ve seen ourselves — I have just set out that we’ve seen ourselves from the legislature — state legislatures that we’ve seen across the country that suppress the right to vote.”
Since the passage of voter identification legislation in the early 2000s, Democrats have warned against systematic voter repression, claiming it would target racial minorities.
In 2021, Georgia was among 19 states that passed electoral reforms to expand voter ID requirements to include absentee ballots, crack down on ballot collection, and erase voter registration lists that list the names of the dead and those who have moved.
Then as now, voter turnout increased in all sections of the population.
“Looking at past Georgia voter demographics, the electorate is older and darker than in previous elections as hard-fought races for the U.S. Senate, governor and other statewide offices drive voter enthusiasm,” Georgia Public Broadcasting reported.
A Gallup poll last month found that 79% of Americans said they support voter ID legislation, with majorities speaking across racial and partisan demographics. The poll found far less support for maintaining electoral rolls.
Americans support measures to ensure election integrity, political observers say, and higher turnout in Georgia likely reflects growing confidence in electoral processes.
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