By Rich Lowry
Monday, May 23,
2022
We all know what happens when a tree
falls in an empty forest. What happens when a democracy emerges unscathed from
a purported vile racist threat to its very existence?
Pretty much the same thing, it turns out.
The surge in the early vote in Georgia
shows that all the smears about the state’s new voting law, repeated by
everyone from the president of the United States on down, were complete
nonsense — a fevered fantasy that the credulous and fanatical believed because
they didn’t know better, and the cynical and opportunistic believed because it
served their purposes.
On the Republican side, according to the
secretary of state’s office, there were 453,929 early votes and 29,220 absentee
votes so far this primary season (the absentee votes will keep coming in through
Election Day on Tuesday). This is compared with just 153,264 early votes and
14,795 absentee voters during the last, pre-pandemic midterm, in 2018.
The Democrats have seen a similar surge.
In 2022, there were 337,245 early votes and 31,704 absentee votes so far,
compared with only 134,542 early votes and 13,051 absentee votes in 2018.
As Jim Geraghty
has pointed out, the early vote among minorities in
particular is up markedly.
It never made sense that the Georgia law
was going to stop anyone from voting. The provisions that the Left complained
about were clearly innocuous.
The rule against third parties providing
food and drink to voters standing in lines at the polls was merely meant to
stop electioneering at polling places (and the law attempts to address long
lines, typically a problem of large, Democratic-run jurisdictions). The law
limited drop boxes, but they hadn’t existed prior to 2020. It moved from
signature match on mail-in ballots to the more reliable driver’s license or
state-ID number — not a sea change. And it expanded hours available for early
voting.
Now that a tsunami of early voting has
shown that, indeed, there’s no voter suppression in Georgia, the disinformation
scolds are nowhere to be seen; the fact-checkers aren’t swinging into action;
the major newspapers aren’t preparing tick-tocks on how the president was led
down the path of promoting misinformation about the legitimacy of our electoral
system; the Sunday shows didn’t do long segments devoted to the theme of how
democracy in Georgia, once claimed to be hanging by a thread, has remarkably
revived — praise God, and hallelujah.
Nina Jankowicz hasn’t celebrated the
triumph of truth over a baldly misleading viral narrative in prose, verse, or
song — and presumably she never will.
As with the Russian hoax, having promoted
the Georgia voting hoax means never having to admit error, let alone apologize.
There wasn’t a cottage industry, as the
cliché has it, devoted to warning of the dire effects of the Georgia voting
law; there was a veritable pollution-belching smoke-stack industry.
The widely quoted Brennan Center, whose
job is to seed the media with left-wing arguments masquerading as neutral
analysis, went into overdrive. It claimed that, as one headline had it, “Voter
Suppression Efforts in Georgia Are Escalating,” and in another piece, titled simply, “Georgia’s
Voter Suppression Law,” that
“Gov. Brian Kemp signed a wide-ranging bill that targets Black voters with
uncanny accuracy.”
The progressive commentariat wrote as if
the 1950s were upon us once again. Charles Blow of the New York Times was
on the case. He wrote columns headlined “Voter
Suppression Must Be the Central Issue” and “Voter
Suppression Is Grand Larceny.” Like much of the Left, he believed that President Biden was a
near-quisling for not fighting the scourge of disenfranchisement on the landing
grounds and the beaches — “Mr. President,
You’re Just Plain Wrong on Voter Suppression” read another headline. According to Blow, “Biden wants to make history
with his agenda, but history is already being made by Republicans with this
extraordinary voter suppression push.”
Blow’s colleague Jamelle Bouie wrote a
column asking of the Georgia law, “If It’s Not
Jim Crow, What Is It?” He
compared the Peach State measures to facially neutral voting laws in the
segregationist South that were really meant to disenfranchise blacks. “To the
extent,” he wrote of the law, “that it plays at neutrality while placing
burdens on specific groups of voters on a partisan (and inescapably racial)
basis, it is, at least, Jim Crow-adjacent.” How judicious.
A University of Maryland professor opined
at the Washington Post, “Georgia’s
voter suppression laws betray the promise of Reconstruction.”
And on it went.
Newsrooms took up the same themes. A
headline in a news story in the New York Times read, “Georgia G.O.P.
Passes Major Law to Limit Voting Amid Nationwide Push.” Another headline on a Times story ran, “Why the
Georgia G.O.P.’s Voting Rollbacks Will Hit Black People Hard.” That report claimed that “the Republican legislation will undermine
pillars of voting access by limiting drop boxes for mail ballots, introducing
more rigid voter identification requirements for absentee balloting and making
it a crime to provide food or water to people waiting in line to vote.“
Those are pillars of voting access?
Really? More important than easily being able to register and vote by mail or
in-person in advance or on Election Day?
A dispatch for the Washington Post’s food section, of all places,
reported, “New limits on food and water at Georgia’s polls could hinder Black
and low-income voters, advocates say.”
Of course, civil-rights activists and
politicos didn’t hold back. “Our democracy stands in its final hour,” NAACP
president Derrick Johnson said,
in urging to Joe Biden to do even more after his speech attacking the Georgia
law last January.
In Georgia, Bishop Reginald T. Jackson, a
leader of the state’s African Methodist Episcopal churches, related to
reporters after a meeting with the lieutenant governor: “I told him exactly how
I felt: that these bills were not only voter suppression, but they were in fact
racist, and they are an attempt to turn back time to Jim Crow.”
State senator Jen Jordan, a Democrat from
outside Atlanta, called the bill “a Christmas tree of goodies for voter
suppression.”
Stacey Abrams, the original fount of much
of the misinformation about voting in Georgia, explained the alleged Republican
approach: “Instead of winning new voters, you rig the system against their
participation, and you steal the right to vote.”
And then, at Atlanta University in
January, Biden came in with his disgraceful speech
condemning the Georgia law. “Every
Democrat, independent, and Republican will have to declare where they stand,”
he said, adding, “History has never been kind to those who side with voter
suppression over voting rights.”
“Do you want to be on the side of Dr. King
or George Wallace?” he asked. “The side of John Lewis or Bull Connor? The side
of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis?”
Well, it’s election season in Georgia and
Bull Connor and Jeff Davis haven’t shown up.
The journalistic reaction has been, shall
we say, muted. Despite its dire previous coverage, the New York Times didn’t
see fit to mention the false warnings about the Georgia law in its report on the early vote.
The AP had run a story in which Georgia
featured prominently, headlined “As America
embraces early voting, GOP hurries to restrict it.” But a report on what’s happened so far in the primaries notes, without
mentioning the erroneous prior warnings, that Georgia voters “are turning to
early, in-person voting, which is setting records. About 305,000 ballots have
been cast at early voting locations across the state, or three times as many
who did so for the same period during the 2018 primary, according to state
officials.”
To its credit, the Washington Post didn’t
memory-hole the long freak-out about Georgia, running a story headlined “Voting is
surging in Georgia despite controversial new election law.” A better headline would have been “Voting is surging in Georgia
despite allegations about new election law.”
A thread throughout the Post story
chronicles how Democratic activists have changed their strategies in reaction
to the law. But if you can defeat alleged voter suppression with ease by
registering people and getting them out to vote in massive numbers, it’s a good
sign that there wasn’t any voter suppression to begin with.
The Post report ends with
an anecdote about Patsy Reid, a 70-year-old, African-American retiree who was
surprised that she could vote early with absolutely no issue. “I had heard that
they were going to try to deter us in any way possible because of the fact that
we didn’t go Republican on the last election, when Trump didn’t win,” she told
the Post. “To go in there and vote as easily as I did and to
be treated with the respect that I knew I deserved as an American citizen — I
was really thrown back.”
That’s the voice of someone who had been
lied to — repeatedly and at great volume.
Jamelle Bouie ended his Jim Crow column by
saying, “Put a little differently, the thing about Jim Crow is that it wasn’t
‘Jim Crow’ until, one day, it was.”
In this case, it’s a different dynamic:
The Georgia voting law was supposedly Jim Crow until it wasn’t — and then no
one cared.
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