The truth about blue-state voting restrictions.
The truth about blue-state voting restrictions
P resident Joe Biden’s own state of Delaware has more restrictions than Georgia on early voting, and so does New York. Even the Brennan Center for Justice — which specializes in demagoguery on voting laws — was at least consistent enough to call the New York State voting system “the worst in the country.”
Separately, a University of California Irvine election-law scholar said if New York “were a southern Republican state, there would be protests and calls for businesses to boycott [the state], because it’s that terrible.”
Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have demanded federal intervention to stop various red-state election reforms. But if the two are so worried about what they consider restrictions on voting, they should look at their own state.
Democrats claimed the 2021 Georgia law bans drinking water for those waiting in line to vote.
The truth is the law allows official poll workers, as opposed to campaign workers, to provide water to voters. Specifically, the Georgia law says: “No person shall solicit votes in any manner or by any means or method, nor shall any person distribute or display any campaign material, nor shall any person give, offer to give, or participate in the giving of any money or gifts, including, but not limited to, food and drink, to an elector . . . within 150 feet of the outer edge of any building within which a polling place is established.”
The law in New York prohibits “providing meat, drink, tobacco, refreshment, or other provision with a retail value of more than [$1]” within 100 feet of the entrance to polling places, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
So, Georgia caught up with New York as part of its new election law prohibiting campaign workers from handing out food or drinks to voters standing in line.
Georgia’s law allows for 17 days of early in-person voting. New York, by contrast, allows for just ten days of early in-person voting. New York requires voters casting absentee ballots to provide a reason why they can’t come to the polls on Election Day. Georgia has no-excuse absentee voting.
It’s not just Schumer and AOC who are hypocrites.
The voter-suppression-hysteria industrial complex excoriated Iowa governor Kim Reynolds for signing legislation to close polls at 8 p.m. rather than 9 p.m. That only means Iowa polls close at the same time as polling places in Vice President Kamala Harris’s California and President Joe Biden’s Delaware as well as the blue states of Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Washington.
As constitutional legal scholar Ilya Shapiro wrote, “But Democratic criticism of Iowa for reducing early voting from 29 to 20 days is disingenuous when the District of Columbia, Delaware, Hawaii, Maryland, New York, and 16 other states all have shorter in‐person voting periods.”
Indeed, Biden’s home state of Delaware has tougher voting standards than Georgia’s new law on many fronts.
Delaware passed a law that will allow early in-person voting for the first time in 2022. Moreover, even as Delaware allows it, Georgia will still provide seven more days of early in-person voting than the state the president represented in the Senate from 1973 to 2009.
Major League Baseball moved its 2021 All-Star Game from Atlanta to Denver to punish Georgia for its new election-integrity law. In several respects, however, Colorado’s voting laws are stricter. It’s not a clear-cut comparison because Colorado mails out ballots to all active voters. But Colorado voter-service and polling centers must be open 15 days before an election, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, and that’s two fewer days than Georgia allows for early in-person voting. Moreover, Colorado’s law states, “If you are voting by mail for the first time, you may also need to provide a photocopy of your identification when you return your mail ballot.”
In March 2021, chief of the voter-suppression-hysteria industrial complex Stacey Abrams praised a New Jersey early-voting law despite the fact the New Jersey law provides nine fewer days of early voting than the 17 days of early voting in the Georgia law that Abrams has denounced as “Jim Crow 2.0.”
During a virtual appearance when Democratic governor Phil Murphy signed the law, Abrams exclaimed, “I am so excited to be looking up, looking at New Jersey, knowing that New Jersey is taking us in the right direction.” Compared to what?
While closely contested in a few elections, Minnesota is generally viewed as a blue state, having last gone to a Republican presidential candidate in 1972. It was the lone Democratic holdout when Republican President Ronald Reagan carried 49 states in 1984 against Minnesota favorite son Walter Mondale, the state’s former U.S. senator and later vice president. Minnesota also already required a driver’s license or other ID for absentee-ballot verification.
It’s clear what red-state efforts to curb the real threat of voting fraud are trying to accomplish: strengthen voter ID, have clean voter lists, and curb vote trafficking.
Editor’s note: This essay is an adapted excerpt from the newly released The Myth of Voter Suppression: The Left’s Assault on Clean Elections (Bombardier Books).