Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) signed the Election Integrity Act of 2021 into law two weeks ago, after roughly three months of debate in the state over the bill.
Among other things, the law makes absentee ballot voter boxes, which became a source of contention between Republicans and Democrats last year when they were implemented during the pandemic, less likely to be tampered with by placing them in a secure location, such as a polling station. It mandates voter ID for absentee ballot voting. The new law also expands early voting and prevents local and state officials from sending out unsolicited absentee ballot request applications to registered voters.
The law was designed to lessen the possibility of election fraud and to give the state’s residents more confidence in the election process. But that’s not how Democrats see it. President Joe Biden and failed 2018 Georgia Democratic gubernatorial nominee Stacey Abrams have both likened the law to the voter suppression tactics implemented by Southern Democrats during the repressive Jim Crow era, which lasted from the 1870s to the early 1960s.
Biden, who was declared the winner of the presidential election in Georgia after a bitterly contested race, told ESPN in an interview last week that he would “strongly support” Major League Baseball pulling the All-Star game out of the state in protest of the law, which they ended up doing two days later. In the same interview, he said the law shortened the amount of time people could stand in line to vote and said it banned providing food and water to people standing in long lines.
Neither claim is true.
Maybe Biden was handed a set of talking points about the law and hasn’t actually read it, because in no way does it resemble “Jim Crow on steroids,” as he proclaimed. That is an especially offensive comparison, because Biden knows well how far Jim Crow laws went, considering that during his presidential campaign, he openly bragged about building bridges with segregationist Democratic colleagues in the early days of his time in Congress.
Though the references to Jim Crow by Biden, Abrams and other Democratic critics of the law are demonstrably dishonest, they are being made for reasons that were laid out by former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) during a panel segment Sunday on ABC News’ “This Week” program.
Christie started out by pointing to Biden’s inauguration speech, where he promised to unite and heal the nation.
“Politics need not be a raging fire that destroys everything in its path,” Biden said at the time. “Every disagreement doesn’t have to be a cause for total war, and we must reject a culture in which facts themselves are manipulated or made up.”
Then, after fact-checking multiple false claims about the law made by Democracy for America CEO Yvette Simpson, Christie then pointed to the elephant in the room.
“[Biden] is doing exactly what he sat around in the campaign and the transition and accused Donald Trump of doing,” Christie noted. “He is lying to cause racial divisions in this country. That’s what he accused Donald Trump of doing, and he’s a liar and a hypocrite this morning.”
Christie was right on the money. At the heart of the attacks on the law is the desire to keep Georgia’s newly minted blue status for years to come. Manipulating minority voters, as Democrats have done for decades, is a big part of that plan.
With Kemp and other Republicans making it clear they will not back down from this fight, the Democrat attacks on Georgia could ultimately backfire once more Georgians learn that the reason their state lost jobs and money was because Democrats who claim to be trying to protect Georgians from harm were lying about election integrity the entire time.
Media analyst Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym Sister Toldjah and is a regular contributor to RedState and Legal Insurrection.
