Fact-Checked Democrats Forced to Move Goalposts on Georgia Voting Law

A good sign that someone is losing an argument is when they have to continually change the focus of their criticism. An even better sign is when they are reduced to impugning the motives of their opponents as a substitute for showing that their opponents are actually doing something bad.

We started off with “Jim Crow on steroids” hype about the Georgia election law, a shameful insult to black Americans who lived through real segregation and oppression. The proponents of this theme know it to be false, as their behavior makes clear. Indeed, many Democrats are openly salivating at the opportunity to increase voter turnout based on campaigns against the Georgia law — hardly what happened during Jim Crow. As The Hill put it in an article titled “Democrats see opportunity as states push new voting rules”:

Democrats are seizing on the growing outrage surrounding a new elections law in Georgia, hoping to harness that anger to boost voter turnout and combat the hit at the ballot box they fear the new law — and others like it proposed in states nationwide — could bring. … Party leaders have … sounded the alarm in fundraising emails, casting the new laws and proposals as an existential threat to Democrats’ majorities in Congress. … “It’s a motivating factor for voters, but Black voters in particular,” Antjuan Seawright, a South Carolina-based Democratic strategist, said. … Jonathan Tasini, a progressive strategist and former surrogate for Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I-Vt.) 2016 presidential campaign, said that there’s little doubt that Democrats will mobilize their voters in response to restrictive election laws.

The campaign against the new law’s specific provisions has been just as dishonest. Democrats leaned heavily on false claims about a provision barring food and drink handouts to people voting, which responded to real issues. The barrage of lies about “voter suppression” has gotten so bad that even media liberals have had to take notice. Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post awarded “Four Pinocchios” to Joe Biden’s false claim that the law “ends voting hours early so working people can’t cast their vote after their shift is over.” Kessler even branded Biden a “recidivist” when the president repeated the same lie after Kessler pointed it out. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution issued a correction after making a similar claim.

In reality, S.B. 202 beefs up Georgia’s power to force localities (which control individual polling places) to add more precincts and more voting machines, addressing a specific, longstanding complaint by Democrats about the state’s current voting system. More broadly, while the bill modestly shores up election security and efficiency, it also expands weekend voting statewide, permanently authorizes ballot drop boxes, adds more state oversight of local officials, requires pre-canvassing of mail-in ballots to expedite vote counting on Election Night, expands eligibility to be a poll worker, lets illiterate people have others help fill out their absentee ballots, and requires jails to give access to eligible inmates to apply for absentee ballots. On the whole, it creates broader access to voting in Georgia than existed before 2020, and bars nobody from voting. That may help explain why national polling shows that the Democrats’ effort is failing, and that voters are skeptical of corporations directing boycotts at it.

Losing the argument on both rhetoric and facts, critics have fallen back to their last refuge: arguing that it does not really matter what is in the bill or what its effects are, because it derives from bad motives. Just a few examples:

• Delta Airlines CEO Ed Bastian: “The entire rationale for this bill was based on a lie: that there was widespread voter fraud in Georgia in the 2020 elections. This is simply not true. Unfortunately, that excuse is being used in states across the nation that are attempting to pass similar legislation to restrict voting rights.”
• Chris Hayes on MSNBC: “Georgia turns Trump’s Big Lie into law.”
• Zachary Wolf at CNN: “The same week that a major backer of former President Donald Trump’s false election fraud narrative admitted it was unreasonable, Republican lawmakers in Georgia turned legislation inspired by the false narrative into law.”
• Tessa Stuart at Rolling Stone: “How Trump’s Big Lie Is Fueling the Voting Rights Battle in Georgia.”
• Eric Kleefeld of Media Matters: “The Georgia legislation exists because of Democratic victories propelled by Black voters — plus Trump’s Big Lie.”
• Jon Allsop at Columbia Journalism Review: “The why of the restrictive voting bills is also vital, arguably as much so as the what. Republicans across the country have pitched new laws as correctives to public fears about election ‘integrity’—even though such fears were, for the most part, simply made up by Donald Trump and his enablers in the right-wing political and media firmament.”
• Eric Levitz at New York Magazine: “When you account for context — and acknowledge the bill’s most nefarious provisions — the left’s purported ‘double standard’ disappears. The leading lights of Georgia’s Republican Party spent the past five months validating baseless allegations of a stolen election and demonizing their own secretary of State for refusing to do the same. The GOP’s 2020 standard-bearer is still decrying the treachery of Republican election officials who failed to abuse their powers at his behest.”

Attacking motives is fair-enough game when you are explaining the origins of genuinely bad policy, but it is also a convenient crutch when you are unable to make that case on the merits. After all, nobody can ever really disprove a charge that they are operating from bad motives — especially when a bill is the product of two houses of an entire legislature plus a governor, and thus reflects the thinking of a lot of different people. The charge has the double benefit of tying the bill to Donald Trump with voters who might agree with its provisions, but mistrust or despise the former president.

It is also a way of dodging inconvenient facts. Many Democratic-run states have similar anti-electioneering laws and less early voting than Georgia. Stacey Abrams herself admits that she previously — and successfully — supported cutting the number of early-voting days in Georgia in half. It is “OK when we do it” if you simply argue that the same conduct is different because our people have pure hearts, and yours do not.

In reality, it is quite clear that — as usually happens with proposals that make it all the way into legislation — there are multiple reasons why this bill passed, and the lingering belief that the 2020 election was stolen is only one of those. The bill changed quite a bit from some earlier proposals after many hours of hearings, suggesting that this was not simply a headlong “do something” rush. There were at least three other factors at work in passing S.B. 202 that are hard for any serious person to deny:

First, Republicans have been arguing for decades in favor of voting rules that protect the security of elections, require identification of voters and the maintenance of accurate voter rolls, and otherwise defend the system of registered voters. Very little of what is in S.B. 202 is genuinely new, and a number of its ideas were once areas of bipartisan agreement. Progressives are overreaching by arguing that Donald Trump makes it illegitimate to continue standing for exactly the same things many Republicans already stood for. It’s like saying a politician must have been bribed because he voted for something he already believed in.

Second, the 2020 election was a highly unusual one. Democrats like to forget this now, but there was a pandemic on in 2020, and many innovations in mail-in voting and the use of drop boxes were brand-new experiments, adopted on the fly. Drop boxes were not even authorized by Georgia law; they were emergency measures, and new legislation was required to continue using them post-pandemic. There is nothing unusual about reviewing how new emergency measures worked, and tweaking them before enacting them permanently.

Third, it is seriously amnesiac to argue that public controversies over the legitimacy of Georgia elections began in 2020. As Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger has detailed, the false and misleading attacks launched by Abrams on the legitimacy of the 2018 gubernatorial election in Georgia followed much of the same script as Trump’s attacks on the 2020 election. Governor Brian Kemp was broiled by Democrats and the national media at the time on the theory that his role as secretary of state made the entire election illegitimate. Placing the state’s elections on a footing that is more defensible from attacks from either side is an entirely legitimate goal.

Kemp and Raffensperger have defended the new law, and one would think that their courage in standing up to Trump in 2020 — something few Democrats have done with Abrams — has earned them some credibility on this front. Besides, Georgia Republicans cannot, now, undo what Trump did, any more than they can undo what Abrams did; it is their job to deal with public perceptions in a responsible way. The real test of the law is whether it does that.

S.B. 202 itself recites 17 legislative findings for why the bill was justified. Some of these do, in fact, deal with concerns about public confidence in the 2020 election, as well as the 2018 election, the “dramatic increase in absentee-by-mail ballots and pandemic restrictions,” and the need to permanently authorize drop boxes. But it also cites a number of other entirely legitimate objectives:

• Reducing the state’s exposure to lawsuits over the subjectivity of signature-matching by adding more objective indicia of a mail-in ballot’s authenticity;
• Giving the state more ability to take action against “counties with long-term problems of lines, problems with processing of absentee ballots, and other challenges in administration”;
• Promoting uniformity in early voting: “The broad discretion allowed to local officials for advance voting dates and hours led to significant variations across the state in total number of hours of advance voting, depending on the county”;
• Promoting uniformity in funding: “Some counties in 2020 received significant infusions of grant funding for election operations, while other counties received no such funds”;
• Shielding voters from campaign pressure: “The sanctity of the precinct was also brought into sharp focus in 2020, with many groups approaching electors while they waited in line”;
• Counting votes more quickly; and
• Reducing the excessively long nine-week period for runoff elections.

Georgia Republicans, in short, had a lot of reasons for what they did. Not all of those reasons were good, or honestly described, but when can that ever be said of legislation anywhere? Democrats’ late focus on motivations is an admission that the rest of their case against the new Georgia law is falling apart.