By Rich Lowry
Tuesday, March 30, 2021
President Joe Biden is so committed to bipartisan
cooperation and fact-based governance that he’s launched an ignorant and
incendiary attack on the new Georgia voting law.
Biden says the new law is “Jim Crow in the 21st century”
and “an un-American law to deny people the right to vote.”
It’s now practically mandatory for Democrats to launch
such unhinged broadsides. Elizabeth Warren, accusing Georgia governor Brian
Kemp of having stolen his 2018 election victory over Democratic activist
Stacey Abrams (a poisonous myth), tweeted, “The Republican who is sitting
in Stacey Abrams’ chair just signed a despicable voter suppression bill into
law to take Georgia back to Jim Crow.”
Anyone making this charge in good faith either doesn’t
understand the hideousness of Jim Crow or the provisions of the Georgia law.
The old Jim Crow was billy clubs and fire hoses; the
alleged new Jim Crow is asking people to write a driver’s license number on
their absentee-ballot envelopes.
The old Jim Crow was poll taxes; the new Jim Crow is
expanding weekend voting.
The old Jim Crow was disenfranchising voters en masse
based on their race; the new Jim Crow is limiting ballot drop boxes to places
they can’t be tampered with.
It’s hard to believe that one real voter is going to be
kept from voting by the new rules.
To better ensure the security, the law requires that
voters provide a driver’s license or state ID number to apply for a ballot and
one of those numbers (or the last four digits of a Social Security number) when
returning the ballot.
The law narrows the window for requesting absentee
ballots, although still allows plenty of time. A voter can request a ballot as
early as eleven weeks prior to an election or as late as eleven days prior (any
later date risks the completed ballot not getting delivered in time).
Ballot drop boxes were a pandemic-era innovation in
Georgia. The law keeps them, while limiting their location to early voting
sites.
After getting blowback over proposed limits on weekend
early voting when black churches run their “Souls to the Polls” events, Georgia
lawmakers expanded the potential for weekend voting.
The law gives the State Election Board more authority to
take over local election operations, but there’s no doubt that election
officials in Fulton County, where metro Atlanta is located and long lines at
the polls are common, have been incompetent.
Perhaps most controversially, it bans people from
distributing food or drink to voters standing in line, an effort to keep
partisans from trying to sway voters near polling places. But poll workers can
provide food and drink for general use.
The deeper point is that in the contemporary United
States, with such wide and ready access to the ballot, changes around the edges
don’t disenfranchise people.
Georgia considered limiting no-excuse absentee voting to
voters 65 and over. Even this wouldn’t have dissuaded anyone from voting. A
study published by the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research found
that turnout increased in 2020 just as much in states without no-excuse
absentee voting as in states with it.
Strict voter-ID laws have long been denounced as voter
suppression. It’s not true. According to a 2019 working paper for the National
Bureau of Economic Research, “strict ID laws have no significant negative
effect on registration or turnout, overall or for any subgroup.”
And Democrats issued dire warnings about the effects of
the Supreme Court in 2013 ending so-called preclearance that required federal
approval of changes in the rules in certain jurisdictions.
This, too, was wrong. A paper by a Ph.D. candidate at the
University of Oregon concludes, “The removal of preclearance requirements did
not significantly reduce the relative turnout of eligible black voters.”
None of the facts, though, can possibly overcome the
attachment that Biden and other Democrats have to their emotionally resonant
and politically powerful Jim Crow smear.
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