Voting with ease in Georgia

In 2021, Republicans in Georgia revised the state’s election code. The governor of Georgia claimed the state would make it “easier to vote and harder to cheat.” Stacey Abrams, Joe Biden, and other Democrats called the changes “Jim Crow 2.0” and said it would suppress voters. A week after early voting began in Georgia, it is obvious that the Democrats’ claims were lies.

“In-person turnout was so high in the first week of early voting in Georgia that some days were busier than during the 2020 presidential election,” read the first sentence in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Oct. 24 story on early voting in Georgia. The paper noted nearly 838,000 voters had voted in the first week. Most were in person votes. Absentee voting accounted for only one-tenth of votes cast so far. However, absentee votes take time to process.

Contrary to Democratic claims, voters are finding they can take their own water bottles to wait in lines to vote early, but also they do not need the water bottles. The lines are moving briskly across the state. To be fair, absentee ballot requests are moving more slowly because a voter must now print out the form, sign it, and either email it back as a PDF or mail it. That has slowed down the process. But now the state allows voters to use a website and input their driver’s license or state ID number. That expedites the verification process for voters’ absentee ballots once received by a Board of Elections.

Drop boxes have been restricted. What Democrats miss in their talking points is that drop boxes for absentee ballots were prohibited in the state except for COVID. With the state of emergency over, drop boxes were set to disappear. Instead, Republicans allowed drop boxes to continue with reasonable restrictions—they could only be used during the day, two officials had to check the boxes each day, and their locations had to be at local boards of elections.

Abrams did a national media tour claiming Georgia had re-created Jim Crow era voting restrictions. Her campaign team registered the website jimcrow2.com. She took to calling the law “Jim Crow 2.0.” Other Democrats followed. Abrams then pushed Major League Baseball to remove its All Star game from Atlanta, which Commissioner Rob Manfred did. That move cost mostly minority owned businesses tens of millions of dollars. Now, Abrams is set to lose the Georgia gubernatorial race a second time, and polls suggest she has lost the very non-white voters whose businesses suffered because of her boycott call.

On Monday, Abrams insisted that just because voters are setting records for early voting turnout does not mean suppression is not happening. Thus far, two people have come forward with claims of suppression, but neither person’s claims have held up. One picture went viral on the internet from a progressive showing a local library with a sign saying no early voting could take place at the library. The progressive activist insisted this was voter suppression. Actually, the sign was because the library is a voting precinct for election day, but has never been an early voting location. The sign had a website where voters could find the early voting locations.

Had progressives and the media bothered to make up their minds on facts, instead of raw emotion and talking points, perhaps they would not have fallen for Abrams’ stunt. But hatred of Republicans has made it too easy for Democrats to believe lies about the other side. In fact, Georgia has more expansive early voting days than President Biden’s home of Delaware. Georgia has no-excuse absentee voting and weekend voting that is more expansive than New York.

Georgia also has something else—data. In the first week of early voting, turnout among black voters exceeded their share of the electorate overall with 33 percent of votes cast by black voters. Older voters outpaced every other group. Eighty thousand votes were cast the first Saturday of early voting, which exceeded the 66,000 votes cast the first Saturday of early voting in 2020. If that is voter suppression, I am not sure what voter suppression means.

Stacey Abrams built an impressive operation to run for governor. It has collapsed around her. Democratic pollster Data for Progress has her down ten points two weeks from the election. She is not going to win. Her ground game has collapsed. All she has left is to scream about voter suppression. The national media, constantly pushing back against so-called “election deniers,” will need to hold Abrams accountable for her lies. But I will not hold my breath any more than I expect Georgians will get an apology for the media’s smears about the state’s election reforms that have, as Gov. Kemp noted, made it “easier to vote and harder to cheat.”