© Provided by Washington Examiner To hear Democrats and the media tell it, Georgia has just undone the civil rights era. The state's new election reform law, signed by Gov. Brian Kemp, they say, is an attempt to disenfranchise millions and return to the Jim Crow era.
This narrative is both false and ridiculous.
The story, in brief, is this: Democrats find it politically advantageous to cry that minority voters are being disenfranchised, and so they are doing so once again. And once again, the largest media outlets are going along with the cynical ploy.
Georgia's new voting reform law contains simple, commonsense measures, most of which - and this will shock you if your understanding of the law comes from CNN or President Joe Biden - will make it easier for people to vote. Some of its provisions rightly protect the voting process from the (very real) risk of fraud, a risk that grows as more votes are cast by mail.
But for the Left, Georgia has long been a truth-free zone, and Democrats have found this arrangement agreeable.
In 2018, Democrats made and the media parroted multiple false and dishonest claims about disenfranchisement in the 2018 Georgia governor's race. The media indulged the ludicrous fantasy, every bit as ludicrous as the fantasies that precipitated the Jan. 6 riots at the Capitol this year, that Stacey Abrams had that race stolen from her. It worked.
There are no incentives now to tell the truth. This is all part of a political scheme.
There is no more effective way to get out the vote than to claim - falsely, in this case - that someone is blocking voters from the polls.
Democrats' and the media's characterization of the new Georgia law, in general, and in the particulars, has been deliberately false. Evidently, Democrats' fears about their underperformance with minority voters in the 2020 election are even greater than previously understood. Suddenly, they are in a panic that they are losing their iron grip on a key group of voters they have patronized and taken for granted for so long without helping at all. The only cure is to reach out and try to scare the hell out of nonwhite voters.
To understand how flimsy and unwarranted the accusations are and how misleading the media coverage has been, one need only look at how far from the facts their characterizations have been.
Biden himself misled about the Georgia voting law during his first press conference, claiming that it forced polling places to close at 5 p.m., "so working people can't cast their vote after their shift is over." In fact, the law merely requires polling places during early voting to stay open until at least 5 p.m., giving them discretion to stay open until 7 p.m. This is an expansion of voting hours, not a contraction of them.
Another provision that has somehow aroused all sorts of anger in the media is the one barring political campaigners from bribing voters with money, food, water, etc., within 150 feet of a polling place. This provision is already the law in many states, including New York. Liberals are not suddenly outraged by it. The outrage is entirely manufactured and disingenuous. Election workers and community volunteers will still be permitted to distribute food and water to voters in line.
Fortunately, the law also contains provisions that will make these long, dehydrating lines less likely. It empowers state officials to intervene and make voting easier where bad local decisions, mostly by election boards in Democratic-dominated cities, have resulted in fewer polling stations, longer lines, and otherwise poor administration. This provision points directly back to the 2018 election, when Kemp, then Georgia's secretary of state, was dishonestly blamed for decisions that had been taken by local Democratic election boards to reduce the number of polling stations. Next time, state officials (mostly Republicans) will actually have power to undo local Democrats' decisions that reduced voter access, causing long lines.
Finally, the law contains perfectly commonsense requirements that absentee voters provide appropriate proof of identity when requesting their ballots and request their ballot within a perfectly reasonable nine-week window - not the six-month period that was permitted in the 2020 election.
Democrats only just Wednesday backed down from attempting to overthrow the election result in Iowa's 2nd Congressional District after a poll made it clear how unpopular that would be. They still won't acknowledge the result of the 2018 Georgia governor's race, and indeed they still do not accept the 2016 presidential election result. This is all evidence that they only respect voters' rights when the voters vote for Democrats.
It is preposterous for these hypocrites to preen and posture with such lies. Georgia lawmakers have done the right thing and should stick to their guns and defend their law against all these lies and any legal challenges that arise.
Tags: Editorials, Georgia, Voting, Voting rights, Brian Kemp, Stacey Abrams, Joe Biden
Original Author: Washington Examiner
Original Location: Why all the lies about Georgia's new voting law?