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April 1, 2021 (FamilyResearchCouncil) – Last Thursday, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp signed into law an election reform bill designed to address the controversies and problems of recent elections. The Left, predictably, went ballistic. They claim the law ushers in a new Jim Crow era. They claim it prohibits anyone from offering water to people waiting in line to vote. Even President Joe Biden repeated, “It's an atrocity. … They pass a law saying you can't provide water for people standing in line, while they're waiting to vote.” Biden also claimed the legislation “ends voting hours early” and amounts to “Jim Crow in the 21st Century.”

The problem with all of these claims, as you might expect, is that they lack even a shade of truth. The usually-fawning Washington Post awarded Biden “Four Pinocchios” for alleging the law reduced voting hours. It actually expanded early voting hours to include an extra Saturday and a minimum of eight hours on weekdays. Governor Kemp responded on “Washington Watch,” “I almost feel sorry for the president that he was so misinformed, obviously, by his handlers, not knowing what the bill says.”

The claim that voters waiting in line may not receive water, Kemp continued, is “just factually not correct.” In fact, the bill explicitly allows poll workers to provide water. The bill merely prohibits soliciting votes outside a polling location — including offering gifts like food and drink. Most states have codified such a commonsense provision, which can protect voters from intimidation and unfair influences, from Montana to Minnesota to Biden's own Delaware. The Democrats' aggressive attacks of Georgia's election reform law are completely unjustified.

What you won't hear from the Left is how the law “makes it easy to vote, hard to cheat,” as Governor Kemp put it. For instance, it “replaces and antiquated, artificial signature match with voter ID.” Disputed signatures have disqualified thousands of ballots in Georgia in recent elections, disproportionately among black voters. Voter ID requirements enjoy overwhelming support, according to a recent survey, with 75 percent of likely voters supporting them, including 69 percent of blacks and 60 percent of Democrats. But the same people who are insisting on vaccine passports to attend a sporting event say Voter ID laws are racist. Go figure.

The bill actually addresses the underlying cause of people needing to have food and water in line — unacceptably long voting lines. Populous precincts must measure wait times and add more voting machines they stretch to longer than an hour. That seems almost as obvious as hiring Chick-fil-A staff to streamline the process. But it doesn't sound racist, despicable, like a targeted effort to suppress voters, or like an attack on our democracy.

But Democrats wrote this playbook “long before anybody even knew what was going to be in the final bill,” said Kemp. They secured the domain name, Jim Crow 2.0, a month ahead of time. “It's just part of the agenda to do [an] unconstitutional power grab and push through H.R. 1,” according to Kemp. This all goes back to their attempt to kill the filibuster and override state election law with their Corrupt Politicians Act. It doesn't make any sense to equate expanding voting hours and improved identity verification with poll taxes and fire hoses. It's hard to believe Democrats have even convinced themselves with their own nonsense. But even their own fact-checkers are forced to admit the facts are against them. The details of Georgia's election reform law flatly contradict the Left's “Jim Crow” narrative.

Printed with permission from Family Research Council.