By: John Fund – nationalreview.com – May 23, 2022

Only four months ago, President Biden came to Morehouse College in Atlanta to push Senate bills that would nationalize election administration and ban states from enacting voter-integrity measures of their own.

A centerpiece of Biden’s argument was a law Georgia passed in 2021 reforming the state’s chaotic procedures, which, through emergency Covid rules, led to some 40 percent of state residents casting mail-in votes in 2020, up from the normal 5 percent or so. Many of these ballots were cast without proper verification or monitoring.

Biden called the 2021 law Jim Crow 2.0 and said,

“The goal of the former president and his allies is to disenfranchise anyone who votes against them.  Simple as that.  The facts won’t matter; your vote won’t matter.  They’ll just decide what they want and then do it.”

Stacey Abrams, the 2018 Democratic candidate for governor who has refused to accept her loss that race, insisting that it was stolen from her, said the new law was “reviving Georgia’s dark past of racist voting laws.”

Don’t expect Biden or Abrams to revisit their remarks now that three weeks of Georgia’s early voting has just ended prior to Tuesday’s primary. Nearly 800,000 Georgians have voted early — more than three times the number in the 2018 primary, and higher even than in the hyper-energized 2020 primary.

“Abrams and President Biden lied to the people of Georgia and the country for political gain,” Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, said this weekend. “From Day One, I said that Georgia’s election law balanced security and access, and the facts have proved me right.”

It’s certainly true that almost everything they’ve said about the new Georgia law is either false or wildly exaggerated.

Biden claimed that Georgia was trying to limit mail-in ballots. In reality, Georgia changed the security protection for mail-in ballots from a signature match to the more reliable method of having voters provide their driver’s license or state-ID number — something Minnesota and other blue states routinely do.

Biden alleged that Georgia Republicans are “taking away” vote-drop boxes and claimed further that the Georgia law “limited their number and the hours you can use them.” Wrong. Georgia’s drop boxes were an emergency measure instituted for the pandemic in 2020. The state actually made the existence of drop boxes permanent and left it to local election boards to decide exactly how many drop boxes they should install in their districts.

Biden also claimed that the new Georgia law limited voting hours. The Washington Post has more than once awarded him “Four Pinocchios” for that claim.

Biden said previous GOP laws had led to longer waits at polling places. But the average wait time in Georgia in 2020 was three minutes.

Even some liberal journalists found Biden’s attacks on Georgia’s alleged “voter suppression” a bit much. CNN’s Jake Tapper said:

The few liberals who have commented on Georgia’s record voter turnout say it does nothing to challenge their doom-and-gloom predictions. “Democrats moved heaven and earth to make sure their constituents were aware of their rights and were able to vote,” a commentator on the liberal website Daily Kos wrote. “Unless people were hiding under rocks, they would have known about the GA legislature’s attempts to suppress their votes. Pissing off voters tends to motivate them, in my humble opinion.”

Facts may be stubborn things, but if you are stubborn enough you can ignore them. Stacey Abrams, who is running for governor again, continues to warn of racism looming just around the corner.

“I am tired of being told that we are the best state in the country to do business when we are the worst state in the country to live,” she said just last week. She may be the only candidate for governor this year whose platform focuses on the claim that her state is “trashing democracy.”

In fact, the only attacks on democracy that are occurring are the election-nationalization bills that Democrats in Congress support. They would interfere with the ability of states to ensure the accuracy of voter-registration rolls, undermine the fairness and integrity of elections, and erode citizens’ ability to participate in and speak freely in the political process.

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Source: Georgia Elections: Voter Integrity Laws Not Suppression | National Review