Not only does Georgia not suppress votes, it’s actually one of the best-run states in the country when it comes to elections.
As Dominic Pino pointed out yesterday, a recent University of Georgia poll hammers yet another nail in the already firmly shut coffin of the spurious “voter suppression” allegations about Georgia’s voting laws. In the poll, none of the respondents had a poor experience with voting:
That’s right: 0 percent of black voters in Georgia said they had a poor experience voting. Zero.
On the positive side, 72.6 percent of black voters said their voting experience was excellent, almost identical to the 72.7 percent of white voters who said so.
Only 0.8 percent of black Georgia voters rated the job performance of election officials in their county as poor. That compares to 1.4 percent of white voters.
When asked if they faced a problem voting, any problem at all, 99.5 percent of black voters said they had not. That’s slightly more than the 98.7 percent of white voters who said the same.
On questions about election confidence and difficulty or ease of voting, the poll presents a similarly positive picture.
We have now accumulated a mind-bogglingly large body of evidence not only that Georgia is not a voter-suppression regime, but that it’s actually one of the best-run states in the country when it comes to elections. To briefly reiterate: Since the oft-maligned 2021 voting law went into effect, early voting in the 2022 primaries on both sides of the aisle — and particularly among minorities — blew the previous midterms cycle out of the water. Months later, the exact same thing happened in the general election. And if that wasn’t enough — if that empirical evidence was all somehow masking the true nature of the Georgia GOP’s nefarious voter-suppression efforts — Georgians themselves are overwhelmingly satisfied with the voting process. To argue that the state is “Jim Crow 2.0,” as the sitting president put it, not only must one wave away the objective evidence to the contrary, but one must also argue that the subjective determinations of actual Georgian voters are wrong.
This shouldn’t still need to be litigated. But there are holdouts, such as New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait, who maintain that Georgia’s 2021 election-integrity law was an effort to rig the state’s elections in the GOP’s favor. I admit to some frustration with Chait’s partisan hang-ups here. Citing arguments that I and other conservatives made defending the Georgia voting law, Chait’s October column, “Don’t Congratulate Republicans If Voter Suppression Fails,” took a kind of anti-anti line on the voter-suppression smear: While “Republicans do have a point here that Democrats exaggerated the effects of the Georgia voting restrictions,” Chait conceded, “the reason voting restrictions are failing to restrict the vote is that Democrats are making a big deal of the fact that Republicans are trying to make it hard for their voters to cast ballots.”
According to Chait, the argument that Georgia Republicans were trying to suppress the vote was consistent with record-breaking voter turnout because “voter suppression has little effect on turnout” — in fact, “Democrats mobilize in response to restrictions, canceling out much or all of the suppressive effect.” This boils down to: “Here’s a lot of evidence that Republicans weren’t trying to suppress voter turnout.” “Yeah, well all that evidence doesn’t change the fact that they were trying to suppress voter turnout.”
It’s useless to try to convince Chait, or anyone else who still holds his position, by pointing to the evidence. His argument was about subjective motivation: He knew that the desire to disenfranchise voters was what was really in the Georgia GOP’s heart. The lack of public evidence of disenfranchisement was simply because the Republicans failed to enact those desires.
According to Chait, “the pushback against [voter-suppression efforts] was so fierce” that Republicans removed “some of the most noxious provisions.” But the only “noxious provision” that he cites is “those targeting Sunday voting, an important element of block-voter mobilization.”
And even there, Chait’s premise falls apart upon examination. “In 2020 only 16 of 159 counties” in Georgia “offered early voting on Sundays,” as Heritage Action notes. “The new law explicitly provides the option of holding early voting on two Sundays for all localities. It actually increases the mandatory days of early weekend voting across the state.”
And what’s more, the available evidence in Georgia shows that even had the original restrictions on Sunday voting gone into effect, they wouldn’t have resulted in an election-altering suppression of votes. In part because of the restructuring of some local election boards under the new Georgia voting law, a handful of counties in the Peach State actually did eliminate Sunday early voting. One of them was the subject of a hand-wringing CNN write-up last May, detailing how, in Spalding County, “the decision by the board to get rid of Sunday voting has brought concerns about voter suppression to the forefront for community members.” Midterm voter turnout did decline in Spalding — by 44 votes (to 24,427 in 2022 from 24,471 in 2018). Not exactly Jim Crow.
If all the data about voter turnout and voter satisfaction weren’t enough, the actual facts here undermine the crux of Chait’s argument, which is that the original intent of the Georgia voting law — containing the “noxious provision” of a ban on Sunday voting — was to suppress votes, and that the only reason that the law didn’t suppress votes is that people mobilized against that provision. Sunday voting was already restricted in most of Georgia — the proposed ban, at least as it pertains to early voting, would have applied to only 16 out of 159 counties. And counties such as Spalding that actually did implement the provision saw a negligible effect on turnout.
Georgians are voting in record numbers. Surveys show they’re happy with the electoral process. The 2021 law not only didn’t suppress votes, but the provisions in it that were allegedly intended to have that effect (a) wouldn’t have applied to the vast majority of Georgians and (b) didn’t actually have that effect in the counties where they did apply. If it walks, talks, and quacks like a duck . . .