Georgia Is Where the Lies Are

O nce again, the liars of the world have descended upon Georgia, which, in its infancy as a purplish state, has become a cynosure for fabulists of all stripes. This is the third time in as many years that Georgia has been wantonly maligned. Who among us would bet against there being a fourth before the end of next year?

The tradition started in earnest in 2018, when Stacey Abrams became nationally famous for refusing to accept the results of a fair election that she lost by 50,000 votes. Abrams still insists that she was cheated, is supported in this holding by many in the press, and has so effectively spread her distortions that, three years later, they are still echoed habitually by figures such as Elizabeth Warren.

Abrams’s complaints in 2018 were numerous, hysterical, and utterly meritless. She complained that her opponent was running for office while he was secretary of state — which he was, but which he’d done twice before without incident, which Democrats themselves had done happily in the past, and which was ultimately irrelevant given that the secretary of state’s office does not count or reject votes. She complained that Kemp had enforced an entirely mainstream law that strikes from the rolls anyone who hasn’t voted for three years and who, having been asked by the secretary of state’s office whether he or she is still a Georgia resident, has ignored the question for two consecutive federal elections. And she complained that Georgia had reduced the number of polling places — which was true, but which was the product not of Kemp’s being secretary of state, but of consolidation by rural counties and the rules set by the federal Americans with Disabilities Act. Together, Abrams cast these complaints as the return of “Jim Crow” — a charge so historically illiterate and irresponsible that, in a sensible political culture, it would have disqualified her from public life in perpetuity. If the Georgia Tourist Board were looking for a Chief Mendacity Officer, Abrams would be a shoo-in.

Somehow, things managed to get even worse in 2020, when, having lost Georgia narrowly but fairly, President Donald Trump engaged in a campaign of fabrication of such staggering scale, malevolence, and obduracy as to almost defy belief. Trump claimed that he’d “won very substantially in Georgia.” He had not. He claimed that, in Fulton County, 300,000 votes had been mysteriously added to the rolls and 200,000 votes had been confirmed by “forged signatures.” This wasn’t true. He claimed that a “minimum” of 5,000 “dead people voted.” They didn’t. He claimed that “thousands and thousands” of ballots were improperly shredded. They were not. As he continued to work himself into a lather, Trump took aim at his own U.S. attorney in Atlanta, called for the Republicans who run the state’s executive branch to “resign,” and, eventually, retweeted Lin Wood’s preposterous suggestion that now-governor Kemp and his successor in the secretary of state’s office, Brad Raffensperger, should go “to jail.” Trump’s attacks on Georgia were the most significant part of what was the single worst incident of sore-loserism in American history — an incident that culminated in the president of the United States encouraging his own vice president to stage a coup. By the time Trump was finished, millions upon millions of Americans had been misled.

A few months later, it is happening again. Last week, Governor Kemp signed a fairly innocuous election-reform bill, and, within days, all hell broke loose. As I write, corporations across the country are lining up to condemn the bill; the press is engaged in its customary fact-free delirium; and President Biden is suggesting that the measure is not just like Jim Crow, but worse. There is no more of consequence underneath this frenzy than there was beneath the previous two — and there is certainly nothing to justify the bill’s comparison to one of the darkest stains on American history, a political regime under which an entire class of people was not only excluded from whole swaths of our society, but habitually beaten and killed, based on its skin color. President Biden is lying about the bill. Cable news is lying about it. Politicians in other states are lying about it — often hypocritically. Nothing sums up the absurdity of the situation better than the fact that the CEO of Delta initially praised the final law, but then, having seen the lies take hold in the public’s imagination, felt obliged to condemn it.

All told, one cannot help but feel sorry for Secretary of State Raffensperger and his chief operating officer, Gabriel Sterling, who have now been required twice within the last six months to face down an angry, tempestuous mob while armed with nothing more potent than the uninspiring truth. Bemused by his demotion from resistance hero to public enemy, Sterling explained this week that the new “claim of voter suppression has the same level of truth as the claims of voter fraud in the last election.”

That is to say: none.