Record Turnout in Georgia Primary Destroys Left’s Lies About ‘Voter Suppression’

Ballot box in front of an outline of the state of Georgia.
In March 2021, Republicans in Georgia passed the Election Integrity Act of 2021. This bill was blasted as an effort to “suppress the vote” by Democrats ranging from Joe Biden to election denier Stacey Abrams. In the wake of the bill’s passage, the MLB even decided to move their league’s All-Star Game out of Atlanta, which cost the economy of Georgia’s largest city upwards of $100 million.

If the left was right about Georgia’s election integrity law, we would have seen a huge drop in voter turnout in the state’s May 2022 primaries, compared to other recent elections. Not only that, but this would have been felt disproportionately among minority voters, since Democrats, in keeping with doctrine, declared the law “racist.” But of course, those on the left who predicted this couldn’t have been more wrong.

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. 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?

Predictably, the Democrats have no coherent response to any of this. Replying to her claims about Georgia’s election integrity law being proven false, Stacey Abrams deflected and said that “voter suppression” is “whether or not you make it difficult for voters to access the ballot.” But how can it be more difficult to access the ballot, when there’s more voter participation than ever before?

Georgia’s law clearly did exactly what it was designed to do. It’s now easier to vote in the state, but harder to cheat.

So why do Democrats still oppose voter integrity measures like Georgia’s bill, when the numbers show it isn’t any harder to vote? It seems like their real problem with these laws is that they make it harder to cheat.

In 2020, Democratic governors and judges in various states altered voting rules related to mail ballots at the 11th hour, often defying the state legislatures by doing so. One can argue these changes significantly increase the chance of voter fraud, and incentivize corrupt activities like ballot harvesting.

Still, Democrats wanted to keep these new rules in place forever. This is why Democrats attempted to smear Georgia Republicans who supported election integrity as “racists.”

It is difficult to forget President Biden’s disgusting attack on the law, when he called it “Jim Crow in the 21st century.”

Of course, Biden didn’t mention that the vast majority of Americans, including the majority of Black Americans, support the common sense election integrity measures at the center of the Georgia bill, particularly when it comes to voting by mail. And if this bill was really “Jim Crow in the 21st century,” Black voters in the state wouldn’t be casting ballots in record numbers after the law’s passage.

None of the left’s hand wringing on this issue was ever done in good faith. Instead, it was a clear attempt by Democrats to make their corrupt new voting procedures the norm in American life.

Thankfully, Georgia Republicans saw through this, and have preserved election integrity – all while allowing those who want to legally vote to do so.

Democrats are attempting to ignore the fact that all of their predictions about Georgia’s election integrity law have been proven false. But Americans know the truth. The left couldn’t care less about election integrity. They only care about holding on to power.

Adam Brandon is president and CEO of FreedomWorks.