OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
After the GOP-led state legislature in Georgia passed a new voter integrity bill last year and it was signed into law by Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, leftist talking heads and Democrats predicted it would mark the return of the “Jim Crow era” and stunt voter turnout, especially for black Georgians.
But according to data from this week’s primary elections, that prediction did not pan out. In fact, it wasn’t close at all.
Writing at Fox News, Freedomworks CEO Adam Brandon reports:
According to Tuesday night’s results, early voting in the state of Georgia shattered records, including among minorities. Overall turnout broke primary records, too, with more than 1.9 million Georgians having cast their ballots, compared to 1.16 million in 2018.
In fact, early voting rates in Georgia’s primaries were even higher than they were before the 2020 presidential election. This is despite the fact that early voting surged to record levels in 2020, and that primaries tend to have lower rates of voter participation than general elections – especially presidential elections.
“Taken together, this data totally destroys the left’s narrative that election integrity measures drive down voter turnout, particularly among minorities,” the op-ed continued.
“If the state’s election law is stopping Black Georgians from voting, why does this group make up a higher percentage of voters in the state than in 2020, before the law was passed?”
Georgia GOP primary turnout by year:
2006 – 419,254
2010 – 680,499
2014 – 596,218
2018 – 608,380
2022 – 1,109,506— Ryan James Girdusky (@RyanGirdusky) May 25, 2022
But that’s not all: Tuesday’s primaries were huge for Republicans.
According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, data showed that thousands of Democrats cast ballots for GOP candidates.
“AJC election guru Mark Niesse crunched the numbers and determined about 7% of Georgia voters who have cast GOP ballots so far previously pulled a Democratic ballot two years ago. That’s about 16,000 voters of the roughly 237,000 who voted in the Republican primary,” the paper reported last week.
It’s possible that many of those Democrat voters are attempting to send a message to former President Donald Trump by casting a ballot against his chosen candidate, former U.S. Sen. David Perdue, who ran unsuccessfully in the GOP gubernatorial primary against incumbent Gov. Brian Kemp. The AJC suggested that is possible and even interviewed some Democrat voters who did so.
But overall, the turnout was much higher than left-wing pundits and state Democrats predicted when they accused majority Republicans in the state legislature of passing “Jim Crow 2.0,” the phrase used to describe voter integrity measures that made it easier to vote but harder to cheat.
The final update for the final day of record early voting here in Georgia:
140,091 total early votes today.73,465 Republican
65,922 Democrat
704 Nonpartisan#gapol— Gabriel Sterling (@GabrielSterling) May 21, 2022
As of Friday before the Tuesday primary, 800,000 Georgians had cast an early ballot. “That is three times the number of early in-person votes cast in 2018 and higher than in 2020, according to the report,” the Daily Caller reported.
That, after Democrats complained that the reforms, signed into law by Kemp in March 2021, would lead to voter suppression.
“Republicans in [Georgia] rushed through an un-American law to deny people the right to vote,” Biden said at the time. “This law, like so many others being pursued by Republicans in statehouses across the country is a blatant attack on the Constitution and good conscience.”
Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said “the facts have proved me right” that the law would not lead to suppression, according to the report.
Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey “Abrams and President Biden lied to the people of Georgia and the country for political gain. From day one, I said that Georgia’s election law balanced security and access, and the facts have proved me right.”
Patsy Reid, a 70-year-old black woman, told The Washington Post she did not encounter any of the problems she was told she would have in order to cast her ballot.
“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,” Reid told the paper. “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.”
