Despite Democratic Doomsaying Over New Elections Law, Early Voters Turning Out in Record Numbers in Georgia

Early voters in Georgia are turning out in record numbers ahead of next week’s primary election despite dire warnings from Democrats that last year’s changes to the state’s election laws would suppress the vote and amounted to what President Biden called “Jim Crow in the 21st century.”Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, said more than half a million people had cast early votes in the state by Tuesday — a nearly 200 percent increase over early turnout during the last midterm primary in 2018 and 156 percent more than voted early during the 2020 primary. The record turnout began on day one of early voting, May 2, and has continued ever since.Turnout in the urban districts around Atlanta with a high proportion of minority voters, which Democrats insisted would be suppressed by the new law, is also up. Early voting in Fulton County is up 118 percent over 2020, and it’s up 65 percent in DeKalb County. Early voting ends on Friday. “The record early voting turnout is a testament to the security of the voting system and the hard work of our county election officials,” Mr. Raffensperger, whose office oversees elections in the state, said. “As Secretary of State, I promised to strike a strong balance between access and security in our elections, and these numbers demonstrate that I kept that promise and that voters have confidence in Georgia’s elections.”Georgia’s May 24 Republican primary is shaping up to be a key test of President Trump’s hold on the GOP. Mr. Trump narrowly lost the state in 2020, and went to great lengths to get the Republican governor, Brian Kemp, and Mr. Raffensperger, also a Republican, to change the outcome in his favor after Election Day.Mr. Trump has channeled some of his fury over the outcome into support for Republican challengers to Messrs. Kemp and Raffensperger in the primary. Mr. Kemp enjoys a comfortable lead in the polls; Mr. Raffensperger’s race is much closer. An analysis of the early votes by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution suggests that some Democratic voters may be switching over to vote in Republican primaries in order to thwart Mr. Trump. By mid-week, about 16,000 out of the 237,000 early votes cast in Republican primaries were by Democrats, the newspaper reported.After the dust-up over the 2020 vote, Georgia passed new rules covering local elections that prompted howls of protest from Democratic voting-rights advocates, boycotts against major companies in Georgia, and a decision by Major League Baseball to move its All-Star Game to a venue outside the state.In March 2021, Mr. Biden called the new law “an atrocity” akin to “Jim Crow in the 21st century” and promised that the Department of Justice would investigate whether it violated federal laws.So-called Jim Crow laws were passed in many Southern states after the end of Reconstruction in the 1870s. Many enforced racial segregation and disenfranchised black voters through such measures as poll taxes and literacy tests.“Instead of celebrating the rights of all Georgians to vote or winning campaigns on the merits of their ideas, Republicans in the state instead rushed through an un-American law to deny people the right to vote,” Mr. Biden said in a statement released the day after the bill was signed by Mr. Kemp.“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. Among the outrageous parts of this new state law, it ends voting hours early so working people can’t cast their vote after their shift is over. It adds rigid restrictions on casting absentee ballots that will effectively deny the right to vote to countless voters,” the statement said.The law in question reduced the number of drop boxes for absentee ballots and required that they be inside an early voting location and accessible only during business hours. In 2020, during the Covid pandemic, the boxes were allowed outside and accessible to voters 24 hours.The law also reduced the window during which voters could request an absentee ballot from six months to 67 days before the election and made it illegal for local officials to mail absentee ballots to all voters, as Mr. Raffensperger did ahead of the June 2020 primary election. It also requires voters to provide proof of identity when requesting absentee ballots.When it was passed, many Georgia-based companies took the unusual step of wading into the debate, with some calling it “unacceptable.”Delta’s CEO, Ed Bastian, in a memo he sent to all of Delta’s 83,000 employees, said the spirit of the law “does not match Delta’s values.“After having time to now fully understand all that is in the bill, coupled with discussions with leaders and employees in the Black community, it’s evident that the bill includes provisions that will make it harder for many underrepresented voters, particularly Black voters, to exercise their constitutional right to elect their representatives,” the memo stated. “That is wrong.”

Despite Democratic Doomsaying Over New Elections Law, Early Voters Turning Out in Record Numbers in Georgia

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