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Biden’s ‘Jim Crow 2.0’ Dies in Georgia
Voter turnout in the state exceeds the record of 2018, with no report of problems.
By The Editorial Board, WSJ
Nov. 9, 2022 6:52 pm ET
Control of the House and Senate still hangs in the balance, but one Tuesday result was clear: President Biden’s “Jim Crow 2.0” rhetoric about state voting laws was a nasty political distortion.
The Georgia Secretary of State website reports that by Wednesday afternoon’s counting, 3,957,880 voters had cast a ballot in Tuesday’s election, slightly higher than the vote total in 2018—which was historic. The percentage of registered voters casting ballots dipped slightly, though that’s likely owing to the striking 520,000 increase in voter registration over the past four years. Georgia also banked record early turnout, far exceeding 2018, and coming very near to rivaling early turnout in the 2020 presidential election.
Compare this to Mr. Biden’s warning in Atlanta in January that Georgia’s 2021 election reform was “Jim Crow 2.0.” He claimed it was intended to accomplish “two insidious things: voter suppression and election subversion.” He said the new law made it harder to vote by mail or drop box, with the clear goal of “longer lines at the polls.”
He also warned of “threats” and intimidation against election officials, and sowed doubt about future election outcomes, since the law made voting about “who gets to count the vote and whether your vote counts at all.” This falsehood caused the CEOs of Delta and Coca-Cola to attack the law and Major League Baseball to yank it’s All Star Game from Atlanta.
What the law really did is increase electoral integrity and voting options. It expanded weekend early voting statewide; formalized the use of drop boxes (not allowed prior to 2020); left in place no-excuse absentee voting; and ended subjective signature matching—to minimize the number of rejected absentee ballots.
All this worked to make voting—including early voting—easier, as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution admitted in a piece that began: “Voters found out Tuesday that it’s possible to have both high turnout and short lines,” adding that “no one reported threats or illegal behavior at polling places.”
As for the counting, Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock leads Herschel Walker as they head to a Senate runoff. Do Democrats doubt that result? Stacey Abrams lost her rematch with Gov. Brian Kemp by so much that she couldn’t cite voter suppression as an excuse, as she did in 2018 without evidence.
In the aftermath of 2020, some 19 states passed election reforms to increase confidence in the voting process, after Democrats used the pandemic to impose last-minute rule changes that helped sow distrust. From the early reports of solid turnout and orderly counting, it appears to have worked. Mr. Biden and his “Jim Crow” jeerers owe them an apology.
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