Peach Tree Times

The record early voter turnout in Georgia is the “finest rebuttal possible to claims of ‘voter suppression’ that were made repeatedly over the last year,” Jason Snead, executive director of the Honest Elections Project, told the Peach Tree Times.

“As of today, turnout is triple what it was at this point in the 2018 midterm primary in Georgia, and double 2020,” Snead said in an email. “Early figures also indicate that minority voter turnout is surging, too. Put simply, there is not—and never was—any validity to the argument that SB 202 was ‘Jim Crow.’”

The ”Jim Crow” charge was made by President Joe Biden, and other leading Democratic officials, upon passage of Georgia's Voting Integrity Act of 2021 in March of that year. In June, Biden’s Department of Justice sued Georgia over the law, arguing that it violates Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which prohibits discriminatory voting practices.  

Yet others pointed out that the voting laws in many other states, "blue" states included, are actually more restrictive than Georgia’s new law.

Election rules in Biden’s home state of Delaware, in fact, make it harder than the year-old law in Georgia for many people to vote.

“If President Joe Biden wants to vote by mail next year in Delaware, he’ll have to provide a valid reason for why he can’t make the two-hour drive from the White House back to his polling place in Wilmington,” wrote Russell Berman in April 2021 in The Atlantic. “Luckily for him, Biden’s line of work allows him to cast an absentee ballot: Being president counts as ‘public service’ under state law. Most Delaware residents, however, won’t have such a convenient excuse. Few states have more limited voting options than Delaware, a Democratic bastion that allowed little mail balloting before the pandemic hit.”

Some of the biggest changes made in the Voting Integrity Act focused on absentee ballots as a response to what many considered unsecure voting practices, such as the greater use of mail ballot and drop boxes, ushered in during the pandemic.

Under the changes, most voters will be required to provide a valid ID, either a driver’s license of state-issued ID, to obtain an absentee ballot. They must again provide ID when returning their ballots. And the timeline for requesting the ballots has shortened: voters must request ballots at least 11 days before Election Day and return them before the polls close. In the past, voters could request ballots until the Friday before an election.

Snead also pointed out that the early turnout shows voters prefer in-person voting over mail voting.

“Anyone can request a mail ballot in Georgia, but they are opting instead to go to a polling location—literally voting with their feet—which seriously undermines the left’s argument that we need to move the entire nation towards all-mail voting,” he said.

Reacting to the record turnout, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, told 11Alive News that “what it shows is that it’s never been easier to vote in Georgia, but we have the appropriate guardrails, securities in place. When you have strong security that elevates people’s confidence in the process. So now, we have photo ID for all absentee voting. We have 17 days of early voting. Just Thursday and Friday left to go…but we’re already seeing numbers pushing 200 percent higher than what in 2020."

Primary day is Tuesday, May 24. Party contests for governor, U.S. Senate and dozens of statewide and local offices are on the ballot.