Record-high early-voting turnout clearly demonstrates that Georgia has made it easy to cast a ballot and hard to cheat.
Record-high early-voting turnout clearly demonstrates that Georgia has made it easy to cast a ballot and hard to cheat.
W eeks before the Georgia legislature had settled on election-integrity legislation, the baseless allegations of “voter suppression” were already being trotted out. Whatever bill Georgia passed, Stacey Abrams and her allies had already made clear that they’d call it Jim Crow 2.0. More early-voting days? Jim Crow 2.0. Provisions to cut voting lines down? Jim Crow 2.0. Codifying Sunday voting into law? Jim Crow 2.0.
President Biden took it a step further, saying Georgia’s election law made “Jim Crow look like Jim Eagle” (whatever that means), and pushing objectively false claims about the law in a successful effort to get the MLB All-Star Game moved out of Atlanta. Lies and disinformation from Abrams and Biden ultimately cost Georgia small businesses an estimated $100 million.
I knew their claims were false, because my office played a large role in drafting the legislation. Though I didn’t love every one of its provisions, I knew that the Election Integrity Act would help restore confidence in Georgia’s elections after years of stolen-election claims pushed by losing candidates such as Abrams.
During the Covid pandemic of 2020, election officials understandably struggled to safely and securely administer elections. Officials in Georgia responded heroically, but the stress that voting during a pandemic placed on the system made clear that additional commonsense security measures were necessary.
Passing major voting-reform legislation after a contentious election wasn’t unprecedented. Georgia had passed such legislation after Abrams refused to concede her election in 2019, bringing printed paper ballots to Georgia for the first time in 20 years. And after the 2020 election was marred by similarly unfounded stolen-election claims, it became clear that further major action was needed to restore confidence in the system.
Since early voting for the midterm primaries started two weeks ago, we have seen that Georgia Republicans were right to secure the state’s elections. Georgia’s new election law restored confidence in the integrity of the vote and struck a good balance between security and accessibility in Peach State elections. As a result, Georgia voters have been returning to the ballot box in droves.
From Day One, early-voting turnout in Georgia has been setting records. More than 27,000 Georgians cast in-person votes on the first day of early voting — three times the turnout recorded on the first day of voting in the 2018 primary and double the turnout recorded on the first day of voting in the June 2020 primaries.
That trend has continued in the two weeks of early voting since. Through yesterday, nearly 500,000 Georgians had voted early in person — a 155 percent increase from the same point in the 2020 primaries and a 200 percent increase from the same point in the 2018 primaries.
The surge in turnout is bipartisan. Though the number of voters requesting Republican ballots has outpaced the number requesting Democrat ballots — Georgia does not have registration by party, so voters can request any ballot they want in primaries — turnout in Democratic races alone is still tens of thousands of votes higher than it was at the same point in 2020 and 2018.
Overall, 540,000 voters have cast ballots so far in Georgia’s primary elections, three times the 182,000 that had cast ballots at the same point in Georgia’s last midterm-primary election.
The record early-voting turnout disproves the claims of voter suppression pushed by Abrams, Biden, and pretty much every mainstream-media outlet during the fight over the Election Integrity Act. As I said all along, Georgia’s new election law was designed to expand ballot access while enhancing ballot security. And the record-high turnout so far this year clearly demonstrates that it has done just that.
Abrams and her allies may use lies about voter suppression to raise money and turn out the vote, but the facts speak for themselves.