Biden won’t stop pushing his bogus, cynical narrative of voter suppression
Jason Snead
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With another election season nearly upon us, President Joe Biden is renewing his bad-faith attacks on conservative states seeking to implement popular, commonsense election integrity policies that make it easy to vote and hard to cheat.
Take his recent speech in Selma, Alabama. The president took advantage of a solemn occasion to politicize support for democracy itself, spread lies that undermine our institutions, and sow doubt in future elections that Democrats lose by peddling disproven claims of voter suppression — all in an effort to boost voter turnout among his base.
BIDEN AND HARRIS BOTH WEAK GOING INTO 2024
It’s a claim as cynical as it is dishonest. Perhaps this threat to democracy should be taken a little more seriously by the mainstream press.
The fact of the matter is public trust in elections is shaky. Over the last two years, conservative states such as Florida, Georgia, and Texas worked hard to bolster public confidence by passing election integrity laws that have dramatically improved voting while also expanding voter access.
All the while, President Joe Biden and Democratic pundits claimed these new election laws would suppress the black vote — indeed, they claimed that each was designed to do so. Biden himself supercharged the rhetoric when he labeled the backers of these laws domestic “enemies” akin to traitors like Jefferson Davis.
Just what were these laws that led a sitting president to demonize half the country? Take Georgia as an example. The Peach State already provided even more days to vote than Biden’s home state of Delaware, and the new law expanded the number of days further. Lawmakers replaced a subjective signature-matching process with an objective voter ID standard to reduce errors. They even codified drop boxes for the first time. All this, the Left said, was a threat to democracy itself.
The midterm elections proved that claim so wildly off-base that it ought to be cringeworthy by now. Again, look to Georgia, the supposed epicenter of “Jim Crow 2.0.” The primary saw record-smashing turnout. More than 860,000 people voted early. That’s more than double the number of early votes in Georgia’s 2018 and 2020 primaries. In the November election, more than 2.5 million Georgians cast early ballots — “presidential-level numbers,” according to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.
That should be a win for democracy. Never mind the preposterous argument by left-wingers like Stacey Abrams that “turnout has nothing to do with suppression.” Nobody should be surprised that a politician who spent years claiming her election was stolen through “voter suppression” would refuse to admit error. But on the Left, the “suppression” narrative is now so deeply rooted that even winning candidates such as Raphael Warnock have to claim that their victories merely prove that voters overcame “tricks” designed to thwart them.
Ask the voters directly and they consistently tell a vastly different story. A recent University of Georgia poll found that Georgia voters had an overwhelmingly positive experience in 2022. More than 72% reported that voting was “excellent,” and nearly 99% said they had no problems casting their ballots. Incredibly, over 95% waited less than 30 minutes to vote, and 0% of black voters in Georgia considered their voting experience to be “poor.”
Seventy-year-old Patsy Reid is one of those black voters. After months of endless misinformation about Georgia’s voting laws, Reid told the Washington Post that she was shocked to “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.”
Clearly, the Left’s rhetoric does not match reality, which in part explains why the public overwhelmingly embraces the laws smeared by Biden and his fellow progressives. In fact, support for photo ID laws has skyrocketed over the last two years. A whopping 84% of voters support a photo ID requirement to vote, with 75% of black voters and 90% of Hispanics agreeing. It’s no wonder Biden would rather smear election integrity laws than debate them on their merits.
Clearly, it is time to put voter suppression claims to rest once and for all, but Biden’s remarks signal that progressives are ready to reiterate the misinformation instead.
That’s a decision with real consequences. After all, public trust in elections is already shaky. Politicians like Biden may cynically gamble that smearing opponents as “vote suppressors” will animate his own party’s base and ironically help turnout. But in the long run, it stokes division and arms sore losers with a presidentially-endorsed means to deny elections when they lose.
That’s a dangerous path to go down. There is an alternative, though: dial down the rhetoric, get back to the facts, and celebrate the success of American democracy — and the election integrity laws that make it easier to vote and harder to cheat.
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Jason Snead is the executive director of Honest Elections Project.