Georgia Sets Midterm Turnout Record Despite Vote-Suppression Fear-Mongering

Georgia voters cast just shy of four million ballots during this year’s election, a record high number for a midterm election in the state, despite allegations by prominent Democrats that Republicans were intentionally trying to suppress minority votes.

According to Georgia Secretary of State data, 3,957,598 voters cast ballots in the 2022 midterm election, up slightly from 3,949,905 in 2018 – a difference of 7,693 ballots.

The only Georgia elections that have had higher raw turnout were the 2016 and 2020 general elections and the 2021 U.S. Senate runoffs, according to a review of state data. Georgians cast about 4.2 million ballots in 2016, when Donald Trump faced Hillary Clinton in the presidential race. There were just over 5 million ballots cast in the 2020 general, which included the presidential race between Trump and Joe Biden, as well as two high-profile U.S. Senate races. And about 4.5 million voters cast ballots in the 2021 runoffs, which gave Democrats control of the Senate.

The record 2022 midterm vote was spurred by high-profile races for governor and U.S. senator, including a rematch between Republican governor Brian Kemp and Democrat Stacey Abrams, a chief purveyor of the voter-suppression allegation. Kemp, who drew Trump’s ire for not helping him to overturn the 2020 election results, handily defeated Abrams on Tuesday, winning 53.4 percent of the vote. Abrams conceded early Wednesday, something she refused to do in 2018, telling supporters that, “We may not have made it to the finish line, but we ran that race.”

The Senate race between Republican football star Herschel Walker and Democratic incumbent Rafael Warnock is headed to a runoff, because a fringe libertarian candidate won enough votes to prevent either of the major party candidates from receiving a majority.

While Georgians cast a record number of midterm election ballots, there was a slight drop in the percentage of registered voters who participated. About 57 percent of Georgia’s roughly seven million registered voters cast ballots in this election, down from 61 percent in 2018, when there were 6.4 million registered voters. In the 2014 midterm, only about 50 percent of Georgia’s 5.2 million registered voters cast ballots, according to state data.

In the wake of the contested 2020 race between Trump and Biden, Georgia Republicans passed the Election Integrity Act of 2021, which was signed into law by Kemp in March of that year. Prominent Democrats, including Biden, pointed to the law as evidence that Georgia was a key state in a Republican-led conspiracy to disenfranchise minority voters nationwide. He called the law “Jim Crow in the 21^st Century,” an “atrocity,” and “the most pernicious thing.” Progressive groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, the NAACP, and the Southern Poverty Law Center – as well as the U.S. Department of Justice – filed legal challenges. Major League Baseball moved the 2021 All-Star Game out of Atlanta, harming local businesses.

Democrats repeatedly mischaracterized provisions of the law, including an effort to curb a real problem called line-warming, when candidates or other partisans approach voters in line to give them freebies – food, drinks, or other gifts. The Georgia law didn’t bar giving voters food or drinks, it just clarified that it can’t be done within 150 feet of a polling location or within 25 feet from the voting line. In a January speech in Atlanta, Biden said that “when the Bible teaches us to feed the hungry and give water to the thirsty, the new Georgia law actually makes it illegal … to bring your neighbors, your fellow voters food or water while they wait in line to vote.”

Biden also falsely claimed that Georgia’s law cut back on voting hours, and Democrats complained about Georgia’s strict photo ID requirement to vote in person, even though studies have repeatedly shown that photo-ID requirements don’t suppress voting.

When it came time to actually vote, it soon became clear that if the Georgia election law was intended to suppress votes, it was a failure. A record number of voters cast ballots during the state’s primary election in May. And a National Review analysis of Georgia election data found little evidence that black and minority voters are having a harder time voting in the state.

“I knew their claims were false, because my office played a large role in drafting the legislation,” Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger wrote in National Review in May. “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.”

Early voting for the 2022 midterm also set a record, with more than 2.5 million Georgians casting ballots ahead of Election Day, up 20 percent from the 2.1 million who did so in 2018.

“Georgia voters came out in near Presidential-level numbers,” Raffensperger said in a prepared statement on Saturday. “County election directors handled that demand with utmost professionalism. They navigated a whole host of challenges and executed seamlessly. They deserve our highest praise.”

Still, Abrams continued to contend that the record voting didn’t mean that voters weren’t being suppressed. “We know that increased turnout has nothing to do with suppression,” she said in May. “Suppression is about whether or not you make it difficult for voters to access the ballot. And in Georgia, we know difficulty has been put in place for too many Georgians who vote my mail, who had to figure out a calendar of applying just early enough, but not too late.”

MSNBC political contributor Jason Johnson on Tuesday used the voter-suppression allegation to begin casting doubt on Georgia’s election results. “The level of voter suppression is beyond anything that we saw in 2018,” he said. “We can’t say that whatever happens tonight is a fair and equitable election because there have been too many laws passed by election deniers.”

Gabriel Sterling, Georgia’s deputy secretary of state, responded on Twitter, writing, “This kind of disinformation needs to be called what it is…a lie. To claim there is any voter suppression in GA is simply a lie. It’s an easily provable lie.”