Remember when our president claimed that Georgia’s election-integrity law was “Jim Crow on steroids”? And his vice president insisted similar laws were voter suppression because rural bumpkins don’t have “Kinkos” or “OfficeMax” and thus can’t possibly be expected to figure out how to photocopy their IDs?
Now that Georgia’s early primary voting turnout has blown tallies from the last few elections out of the water, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are pretty quiet. So are the rest of the corporate media, which dutifully parroted the narrative that the Peach State’s push for election security represented Republican efforts to kill democracy with vicious racism.
According to Georgia’s secretary of state, 857,401 people voted in the state’s 2022 midterm election, including almost 800,000 of them in person by the end of early voting on Friday. By the end of early voting in 2020, the number of in-person voters was 326,351, and in pre-pandemic 2018 that number didn’t even break 300,000.
That makes this midterm tally a pretty dramatic spike. But even more impressive is the rise in the number of non-white voters, of which approximately 100,000 more voted early compared to 2018.
How could it possibly be that early voting significantly increased, especially among minorites, under a Republican regime of racist “Jim Eagle” suppression? There must be some mistake if we are to believe any of the media’s apocalyptic predictions from back when Georgia added simple safeguards while expanding voting locations and early voting, such as limiting electioneering in polling-place lines and requiring a driver’s license or state ID number. According to the corporate press, democracy itself was hanging in the balance.
For instance, The Washington Post editorial board claimed, “Georgia’s new law makes voting harder — not better,” with one editor calling the law “shameful” and a “product of GOP desperation.”
“Jim Crow Killed Voting Rights for Generations. Now the GOP Is Repeating History,” Mother Jones announced.
ABC News amplified “The New Jim Crow” narrative, with a New York Times opinion column asking of the law, “If It’s Not Jim Crow, What Is It?”
CNN ran a whole slew of self-serious articles as part of a “VOTING RIGHTS UNDER ATTACK” series, and MSNBC piled on the “racist” and “Jim Crow 2.0” bandwagon.
The Hill published an op-ed from a Democrat congresswoman absurdly claiming the “Georgia election law prevents African American, Latinx, others from exercising the right to vote.”
The Georgia law is a “massive voter suppression bill,” according to Vanity Fair, which also repeated a blue lawmaker’s claim that the legislation is nothing more than “Jim Crow in a suit and tie.”
Vox went so far as to condemn the election-security debate surrounding the Georgia law, with Zack Beauchamp writing, “The debate over whether Georgia’s law really suppresses voting reveals just how imperiled American democracy is,” in an article titled, “Yes, the Georgia election law is that bad.”
There’s plenty more where all that came from. And it means Democrats and their media mouthpieces blatantly lied about the intentions of their political foes and the benefits of incorporating some basic election security such as photo ID, which Americans of all races and political identifications support by clear majorities.
The truth is, Biden’s “Jim Crow” moniker, the MLB Georgia boycott, and the media’s “voter suppression” meltdown were never really about protecting black Americans’ right to vote because Georgia’s election law was never trying to attack it — an obvious fact that Democrats understood all along. The entire charade was about power, and it comes straight from the left’s modern playbook: If you can’t beat ’em, call ’em racist.
Note that this smear operation entirely worked to get Democrats more of what they wanted: elections that are weeks long instead of one day, which increases their ability to affect the election outcome unfairly by checking what votes are in and what areas favorable to them they need to harvest votes from still.
Georgia’s legislative battle for elections wasn’t a fight between well-intentioned Democrats who just wanted to help minorities and vile Republicans who wanted to keep people from voting. It was about one party that benefitted from the disasters of the 2020 election, and so branded its opponents as segregationists to keep as much of the chaos going as possible.
Of course, we all could have predicted this outcome. Election-integrity measures are actually great for public trust, faith in the corrupt news media has plummeted, and Americans are tired of the race pandering. Oh, and it’s really not that hard to make a photocopy, even for us country folk.
