Stacey Abrams: Still Sowing Discord in Georgia – “The Fourth Estate’s favorite loser is at it again.” David Catron
Stacey Abrams, the less-than-graceful loser of Georgia’s 2018 Democratic gubernatorial election, took a few hours off from her embarrassing bid to become Joe Biden’s running mate to accuse the Peach State’s leadership of voter suppression in Tuesday’s primary. She has appeared on various talking-head shows and insists the Georgia Secretary of State is guilty of “incompetence and malfeasance.” Abrams provides no evidence to support this charge, of course, other than the presence of long lines at the polls in urban counties, where elections always devolve into chaos pursuant to the utter ineptitude of their Democratic election officials. Abrams inevitably claims the root problem is Republican skulduggery.
I live in Georgia and have voted there in every election since 1994, during the governorships of Democrats and Republicans. The only problems at the polls I have witnessed occurred during my sojourn in a densely populated, Democrat-run county. Long lines, despite Abrams’ assertions, are endemic to such counties — particularly Fulton and Dekalb. In 2000, when Democrat Roy Barnes was Georgia’s governor, I stood in line for hours so I could cast a ballot for George W. Bush and keep former Vice President Al Gore out of the Oval Office. Four years later, when Republican Sonny Perdue was governor, I waited just about the same length of time to vote for Bush’s reelection.
I later moved to a smaller county where the local election officials are more efficient. This not only renders it far more convenient to cast a ballot in person but also makes absentee voting easier. Having spent much of my work life traveling, I have cast many such ballots. My six-year-old grandson could handle the process with ease. If you watch this CBS interview with Abrams, however, you will hear a somewhat different story. She was evidently unequal to the task: “The return envelope was sealed, as I pointed out. I tried to steam it open because I watch a lot of Perry Mason. It didn’t work, so I had to go vote in person.” She then proceeded — I kid you not — to pitch universal mail-in voting:
The reality is that across the state and around the country we know that voting by mail is actually a good thing.… If the U.S. Senate will approve the Heroes Act and the $3.6 billion to fix this problem, not just in Georgia, but in Pennsylvania, in Maryland, across the country.… we simply have to put the resources in to scale up our mechanisms. Here’s the thing to remember: Thirty-four states have vote by mail with no excuses. Sixteen additional states have vote by mail in some form. But we need guardrails that hold everyone to the same standards and the investment that makes it possible.
The “Heroes Act” to which Abrams refers was rammed through the House of Representatives last month by Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The legislation uses the coronavirus pandemic as a pretext to impose a $3 trillion scheme to leverage vote by mail and ballot harvesting into a November victory and a permanent Democratic majority. It would require every state to allow “no excuse” absentee voting, provide postage-paid mail-in ballots, mandate that votes are counted up to 10 days after Election Day, and eliminate voter ID laws. It would strip the states of the power to determine how they conduct elections and create a nationalized system that would facilitate fraud on massive scale.
The real problem the Democrats are trying to solve with the “Heroes Act” is their vast enthusiasm deficit. Republicans are obviously far more excited about voting for Trump than Democrats are about voting for Joe Biden. Without imposing universal mail-in voting and ballot harvesting, Trump will crush Biden. This was confirmed Tuesday in Georgia’s primary. Georgia’s Secretary of State reports that Trump had received 838,884 votes compared to Biden’s 726,440. In other words, with no primary competition, Trump still drew 112,434 more voters (13 percent) to the polls than did Biden. This echoes last week’s results in Pennsylvania, as Salena Zito reports in the New York Post:
With almost 98 percent of districts counted, Republicans have cast more than 861,000 ballots for Donald Trump, with 734,000 Democrats voting for Joe Biden. And while it’s still unclear how many people voted in person versus mail-in ballot, some counties are reporting that Trump drew plenty of supporters out of their homes…. Trump had earned 94 percent of Pennsylvania Republicans’ primary votes.… What’s more, only registered party members can vote in their party’s primary in this state and there are approximately 800,000 more registered Democrats than Republicans in Pennsylvania.
It goes without saying, of course, that the legacy media are mimicking Abrams’ mendacious claims about voter suppression and the desperate need for vote-by-mail. In addition, they have concocted their own fictions about the “chaos” that allegedly characterized Georgia’s primary. The chattering class is no more credible on this than it was with its portentous predictions about the carnage that would result when Georgia lifted its coronavirus restrictions. Their real problem, of course, is that the governor of Georgia is named Brian Kemp rather than Stacey Abrams—which means elections in the Peach State will be decided by arithmetic rather than demagoguery.
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