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Posts tagged ‘GEORGIA VOTING LAW’

Republicans Use House Committee Hearing To Demolish Democrats’ Bogus Election Lies


BY: SHAWN FLEETWOOD | MAY 25, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/05/25/republicans-use-house-committee-hearing-to-demolish-democrats-bogus-election-lies/

Former Georgia Rep. Scot Turner testifying before Congress

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During a House subcommittee hearing on “American Confidence in Elections,” Republicans demolished Democrats’ phony narratives regarding nonexistent “voter suppression.”

“Our hearing today will highlight how voters across the country are demanding reforms to ensure that every eligible American voter can be confident that they will have access to the ballot box and that their ballot will be counted according to established law,” said Chair and Rep. Laurel Lee, R-Fla.

For the past several years, Democrats have routinely slandered anyone with legitimate questions about the conduction of the 2020 election. Concerns raised about the influence of hundreds of millions of ‘Zuckbucks,’ interference by federal intel agencies, and censorship by Big Tech platforms have been met with leftist accusations of subverting “democracy” and advancing “conspiracy theories.” Legacy media have additionally used the term “election denier” to smear and silence their political opponents over such concerns.

During Wednesday’s hearing, however, Scot Turner, a former Republican state representative from Georgia, turned the tables, exposing Democrats as the party that has a history of pushing real conspiracy theories regarding the outcome of elections.

“Faith in the results of elections is vitally key for the health of our republic. But more and more, that faith is shaken by false allegations,” Turner said. “In 2016, the presidential election was marred by allegations of Russian hacking. And while evidence showed that the hacking was of email servers, by December of 2016, half of Democrat voters believed that Russians had changed vote tallies in favor of Donald Trump. That number would skyrocket to 67 percent … after a media barrage and many prominent leaders call[ed] the presidency of Donald Trump ‘illegitimate.’”

A November 2018 Economist/YouGov poll found this to be the case, showing that 67 percent of Democrats believed it was “definitely true” or “probably true” that “Russia tampered with vote tallies in order to get Donald Trump elected.” Meanwhile, only 17 percent of Republicans and 41 percent of Independents believed such a statement to have any semblance of accuracy, according to the survey.

During his testimony, Turner also highlighted former Georgia Democrat gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams’ repeated insistence that her 2018 election against now-Republican Gov. Brian Kemp was illegitimate due to nonexistent voter suppression. Shortly after the 2018 contest, for instance, Abrams told a crowd of supporters that “concession means to acknowledge an action is right, true, or proper” and that “as a woman of conscience and faith, I cannot concede.” Abrams repeated similar remarks during an August 2019 interview with CBS News.

Abrams’ bogus contention ultimately went down in flames last year when an Obama-appointed judge struck down her lawsuit challenging the election. In his opinion, Judge Steve Jones wrote that the voting practices challenged by Abrams’ team “violate neither the constitution nor the [Voting Rights Act of 1965].”

“Abrams’ refusal [to concede] in 2018 is when it became apparent to me as a state representative just how damaging misinformation and disinformation are to our country,” Turner said.

Turner additionally referenced Democrats’ slanderous attacks on Georgia’s 2021 election integrity law, saying that dishonest opposition to such measures “are a form of voter suppression in their own right.” Signed by Kemp in March 2021, SB 202 included provisions mandating voter ID for absentee voting and safeguards on giving voters gifts or money within 150 feet of a polling place. Early voting was also expanded under the law, with counties now required to “offer two Saturdays of early voting instead of just one.”

Immediately after the law’s passage, Democrats and their legacy media allies began smearing the law as a Republican-led effort to “suppress” nonwhite voters. President Joe Biden grossly referred to SB 202 as “Jim Crow on steroids” and called on Major League Baseball to relocate its 2021 All-Star Game from Atlanta in protest. The MLB ultimately acquiesced, condemning the law and moving the game to Colorado. The decision ultimately cost Georgia an estimated $100 million in revenue. Coca-Cola and Delta were also among those to condemn SB 202.

Contrary to Democrats’ claims that the Republican-backed law would suppress Georgians’ ability to vote, the results from the 2022 midterms say otherwise. In addition to record early voter turnout ahead of the Nov. 8 general election, the state also experienced record turnout for in-person, early voting for its Dec. 6 Senate runoff.

A poll conducted after the midterms further revealed that 0 percent of black Georgia voters said they had a “poor” experience voting in the 2022 contest. In fact, as noted by Breitbart, “73 percent said they had an ‘excellent’ overall experience voting, 23 percent said they had a ‘good’ experience, [and] three percent said they had a ‘fair’ experience.”

“At each step of the way and with every improvement to the voting process, the Georgia General Assembly has had critics screaming at them that what they’re doing is wrong, racist, and will hurt communities of various types,” Turner said. “And just like the claims that Russia hacked the election and changed votes, or that Abrams lost because of ‘voter suppression,’ or that the election was stolen, the data and evidence don’t back up those claims.”

Shawn Fleetwood is a Staff Writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He also serves as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood.

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Corporate Media’s Jan. 6 Anniversary Coverage Is All About Silencing Republicans


Reported BY: JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON | JANUARY 04, 2022

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/01/04/corporate-medias-jan-6-anniversary-coverage-is-all-about-silencing-republicans/

Alengthy New York Times editorial over the weekend has set the stage for this week’s Jan. 6 anniversary coverage. “Every Day Is Jan. 6 Now,” declare the Times editors, warning that Republican lawmakers in 41 states “have been trying to advance the goals of the Jan. 6 rioters — not by breaking laws but by making them.”

The argument itself, that tweaking state election law is somehow a subversion of democracy, is absurd and incredibly lazy. But it’s important to note, if only because it will serve as the baseline narrative for the entire corporate media’s Jan. 6 coverage this week. Their message — they will all have more or less the same message — is simple: all Republicans are insurrectionists, the GOP is the enemy of the people, and the only way to preserve American democracy is to ensure that only Democrats can win elections.

To make this case, the Times’ editors had to stage a kind of linguistic insurrection. Lawful, constitutional efforts by elected representatives to change state election laws amount, in the Times’ telling, to a “bloodless, legalized” insurrection that “that no police officer can arrest and that no prosecutor can try in court.”

That’s no different than saying “speech is violence.” It’s nonsensical. By definition, there’s no such thing as a “bloodless, legalized” insurrection, any more than there could be a “mostly peaceful” riot. That said, the Times editors are wrong about one thing: state laws, including state election laws, can and often are challenged in court. 

But the nonsense here serves a purpose. If the Jan. 6 riot can be conflated with perfectly valid GOP-led efforts to shore up state election rules, then perhaps those efforts can be wholly undermined, regardless of what voters in red states want. The irony is that it isn’t GOP lawmakers trying “to wrest control of electoral votes from their own people,” as the Times editors charge; it’s the Democrats and their media allies.

Consider that last year, 44 states enacted some 285 bills related to elections. In blue states, those bills tended to loosen certain election rules and requirements, especially for mail-in and absentee ballots. That makes sense given that Democrats tend to vote by mail-in ballot far more often than Republicans. Making mail-in and absentee voting easier is merely a way to boost Democratic votes in any given state. It’s simple.

By contrast, Republican-led states tended to pass laws limiting or more strictly defining the rules for mail-in and absentee voting, on the theory that absentee balloting is inherently less secure and more susceptible to fraud, especially when paired, as it often is, with practices like ballot-harvesting.

Republican lawmakers’ motivation here was to prevent a repeat of the free-for-all of the 2020 election, which saw a raft of last-minute changes to mail-in and absentee voting rules, justified on account of the pandemic. Many Republicans rightly felt that judges who overruled state legislatures and re-wrote state elections laws by fiat (as happened in Pennsylvania), undermined the integrity of the election.

By passing such reforms, Republican lawmakers were responding to actions taken by Democrats, unelected public health officials, and Democrat-friendly judges to overhaul state election rules ahead of 2020. If you wanted to be disingenuous about it, you could argue that Democrats staged a “bloodless, legalized” insurrection before the 2020 election even took place.

That’s why the Times and the rest of the corporate press want so badly to talk about Jan. 6 instead of getting into the nitty gritty of what these Republican-passed election reforms actually do. You’ll notice the media always describe these laws as “restricting voter access,” even when they do no such thing. The entire conversation is a bit of legerdemain, nothing more. That’s why you’ll never read a piece in the corporate press about how Georgia’s new election law, which President Joe Biden called “Jim Crow on steroids,” actually makes voting easier than it is in Biden’s home state of Delaware.

Remember that when you read breathless remembrances of the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol this week. Yes, the riot was bad and should have been put down with overwhelming force — just as the riots all throughout the summer and fall of 2020 should have been.

But the actions of a relatively small group of rioters that day have absolutely nothing to do with the perfectly valid efforts of GOP lawmakers to ensure that election rules are not changed at the last minute by unelected judges or public health officials. Equating the two, pretending they share a common cause and motivation, is a way to discredit the valid arguments of Republicans, smear them as “insurrectionists,” and eventually justify efforts to silence them.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, National Review, Texas Monthly, The Guardian, First Things, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.

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