Liberals Said Democracy Was Toast in Georgia — Yet Zero Percent of Black Voters Say They Had ‘Poor’ Experience
President Joe Biden delivers a speech on voting rights on July 13, 2021, in Philadelphia. AP Photo/Evan Vucci.
In 2021, the state of Georgia passed a bill tweaking the state’s election processes. Early voting was extended by a day. A voter-I.D. requirement replaced signature verification as an integrity measure for absentee ballots. Those same ballots would need to be requested about two weeks prior to Election Day. Counties with long wait times would be required to split precincts or acquire more voting equipment.
President Joe Biden responded by accusing the legislators responsible for crafting and officials responsible for enforcing the law of creating a system that resembled “Jim Crow on steroids.” He successfully lobbied Major League Baseball to move its 2021 All-Star Game out of Atlanta. His Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against the state. He compared Republicans like Governor Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger — both of whom refused to participate in Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election — with George Wallace and Jefferson Davis.
Progressives in the press followed Biden’s lead. The New York Times‘s Jamelle Bouie concurred: Jim Crow was upon us. Vox’s Zack Beauchamp said the changes revealed “just how imperiled American democracy is.” Politico characterized the legislation as “a restrictive voting law” in a long article treating contrived Democratic concerns over turnout as credulous. The Washington Post‘s editorial board argued it was demonstrative of a “a toxic hostility to democracy.” On national television, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes mourned its passage in a segment titled “Georgia Turns Trump’s Big Lie Into Law.”
Even after the 2022 election shattered midterm records for overall, early, and absentee mail-in turnout in Georgia, this narrative was held fast. In a celebratory speech after winning re-election in the state, Senator Raphael Warnock (D-GA) warned that some might “point to our victory tonight and try to use it to argue there is no voter suppression in Georgia,” insisting that “millions of Georgians endured hours in lines” to vote.
But while Democrats continue to fret that this could be the end of democracy as we know it, a new poll showed few concerns among Black voters.
According to a poll conducted by the University of Georgia, zero percent of Black respondents reported having a poor experience while voting this year. A whopping 72.6%, meanwhile, said they had an “excellent” and 23.6 percent said they had a “good” experience. There was no discernible racial gap: 72.7% percent of White voters said they had an excellent experience and 23.3% called it good.
UGA poll: 0% of black respondents said their voting experience in Georgia was poor in the 2022 midterm election. Around 73% of black voters said it was excellent, equal to white voters. https://t.co/tQYs54wGgN pic.twitter.com/z67fwEJr0d
— Zaid Jilani (@ZaidJilani) January 23, 2023
Only 0.6% of Black voters waited in line for more than an hour, which is half the proportion of White voters that said they spent the same amount of time waiting to cast their ballot. 68.7 percent of Black voters spent between zero and ten minutes in line and 96 percent said they were in line for less than 30 minutes. 77.4% and 95.2% of White voters reported the same.
Georgia’s election system neither walks nor talks like the insidious duck it was described as, so Americans can rest easy knowing that Jim Crow has not re-descended upon the South. The only question left to be answered is whether the Chicken Littles in the press will admit to their error.
This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.
