Here is the question: When will President Joe Biden, failed gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, Major League Baseball Commissioner Robert Manfred, and other denizens of the Left apologize to Georgia’s legislators, governor, and other residents?
The answer is probably “Never,” despite the latest evidence of just how wrong they’ve been about Georgia’s commonsense election reforms in their outrageous claims about the state.
In a propaganda campaign over the past two years that would impress Russian President Vladimir Putin, Biden and Abrams falsely claimed that new Georgia election reforms such as an ID requirement for absentee ballots were “Jim Crow 2.0” and deliberately intended to “suppress” minority voters.
Making the same fraudulent claim, Manfred moved Major League Baseball’s 2021 All-Star Game out of Atlanta to Denver, Colorado. That move deprived Atlanta businesses, many owned by African Americans, of millions of dollars in potential revenue.
This attitude—that minority voters can’t cope with something as simple as an ID requirement—is an offensive, patronizingly racist view of black voters that perpetuates the worst type of stereotypes. Further, Biden’s claim that state legislators’ efforts to protect voters placed them in the same category as George Wallace, Bull Connor, and Jefferson Davis was insulting, incendiary, demeaning, and historically false.
Such bombast was accompanied by lawsuits filed by the ACLU and its political allies alleging that these changes in election law would disenfranchise black Georgians and suppress their votes. To no one’s surprise, the Biden Justice Department jumped in, filing its own lawsuit claiming that reforms such as requiring an ID would “abridge the right of black Georgians to vote.”
The latest data, however, tells a different story. A survey by the University of Georgia and election data compiled by Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger on voter turnout show just how wrong those odious claims were and present a stunningly different picture of the recently concluded midterm elections. That data should be the last nail in the coffin of these lawsuits and end the rabble-rousing lies being spread to scare voters for partisan, political reasons.
The survey from the Survey Research Center of the School of Public & International Affairs at the University of Georgia found that precisely 0% of black respondents said that they had a “poor” experience voting in 2022, compared to 0.9% of white voters.
That’s right—zero percent! In fact, 96.2% of black voters said their voting experience was “excellent” or “good,” compared to 96% of whites, a statistically insignificant difference.
Another question asked Georgia voters to compare their voting experience in the 2022 midterm congressional elections to the 2020 presidential election. State legislators passed the election reform bill, SB 202, in 2021 and its new provisions were in effect for the 2022 elections. Biden claimed the new law was “Jim Crow 2.0.”
Over 19% of black voters said their voting experience was “easier” and 72.5% said there was “no difference,” for a total of 91.6%. That compares to 13.3% of white voters who said they had an “easier” experience in 2022 and 80.1% who said they saw “no difference,” for a total of 93.4%.
So, once again, we have a statistically insignificant difference between the stated experiences of black and white voters—except that a larger percentage of black voters than white voters reported that their voting experience actually was easier after the state implemented the new procedures.
This result is fundamentally at odds with the Left’s provocative claim of rampant voter suppression of black voters. Further, this reporting comes at a time when Georgians cast “more votes … than [in] any other midterm” in the state’s history, with black voters making up 48% of this increase since 2000, according to the Pew Research Center.
Raffensperger’s own data corroborated the survey, and the secretary of state noted that “Georgia voters came out in force in the 2022 midterm elections, shattering midterm turnout records.”
Among the many Georgia records broken were the number of early votes cast and the turnaround time taken to count them—early votes being one of the many areas that both Biden and Abrams also complained about, although their claim of a shorter period of early voting was factually wrong.
As to Abrams’ false claim of “voter suppression” because of excessive wait times for black voters to cast their ballots, the data once again tells another story: 68.7% of black voters reported that they had no wait time at all, or had to wait less than 10 minutes. Another 27.3% said they waited only 10 to 30 minutes.
That means that 96% of black voters voted within 30 minutes of getting to a polling place. The comparable number for white voters was 95.2%.
As was the case in 2018, Abrams’ claims of voter suppression and racial profiling in 2022 are not supported by a single iota of available evidence. The same holds true for the meritless lawsuit filed by the liberal ideologues in the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Justice Department.
Although it likely will not deter those on the Left from engaging in abusive litigation accompanied by apocalyptic rhetoric to fight sensible election reforms, this data proves yet again that secure elections do not harm minority voters. Rather, they benefit all voters by protecting their right to vote in free and fair elections.
This piece originally appeared in The Daily Signal
