Raphael Warnock, Election Denier Victory hasn’t stopped him from leveling false charges that Georgia is engaged in ‘voter suppression.’ By Brad Raffensperger
I have to spend a lot of time shooting down false claims about our elections in Georgia. Usually they come from losers. But sometimes even victorious candidates make false claims about our elections.
After the 2018 and 2020 elections, Georgia had its fill of false claims from losing candidates that our elections aren’t free and fair. For Donald Trump and his supporters, it was tens of thousands of fraudulent ballots that were supposedly cast but somehow never turned up. For Stacey Abrams and hers, it was tens of thousands of voters who were suppressed, not one of whom came forward during her three-year “landmark” lawsuit.
Georgia’s statewide officials—Gov. Brian Kemp, Attorney General Chris Carr and I—stood by Georgia’s elections in 2018 and 2020, defeating the false claims of failed candidates. Last month Georgia returned us to the Gold Dome with commanding margins, whereas statewide Democratic candidates who endorsed or supported Joe Biden’s “Jim Crow 2.0” conspiracy theories came up short in dramatic fashion. Sen. Raphael Warnock made it to a runoff, which he won by the smallest margin of any statewide race.
Mr. Warnock and the White House have decided to double down on false claims anyway. During his victory speech, Mr. Warnock stated: “Just because [voters] endured the rain and cold and all kinds of tricks in order to vote, doesn’t mean that voter suppression does not exist.” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, who has claimed both the 2016 presidential and 2018 Georgia gubernatorial elections were stolen, pointed to unspecified reports of “suppression.”
I thought I had heard every conspiracy theory there was after the 2020 election, but the idea that Republicans control the weather to make it harder for Democrats to vote is a new one. I pity the voters of the Northeast’s blue states who regularly vote in the cold—largely with less early voting than Georgia if they have any at all.
And I don’t even know what Mr. Warnock means by “all kinds of other tricks.” Perhaps he’s referring to Georgia’s common-sense requirement of photo ID for all forms of voting, which he has supported overturning through a federal takeover of elections. Or maybe he’s referring to our citizenship check, which his allies are still trying to overturn in court.
Messrs. Warnock’s and Biden’s stolen-election claims would be laughable if they weren’t so dangerous to public trust in elections. Months ago, a federal judge appointed by President Obama castigated Ms. Abrams’s past campaign manager in open court for calling the 2020 election Democrats won free and fair but the 2018 election stolen. The judge summarized the Abrams position as follows: “When you lost, it wasn’t a free election, but when you won, it was a free election.”
Mr. Warnock, too, seems to see fairness only in Democratic victories. In August 2020, he wrote that unless the Voting Rights Act was rewritten the way Democrats wanted, not only Georgia but the whole country would be deprived of “a safe and fair election.” (No updates to the act have been passed since.) The month before, he claimed “the State of Georgia has failed to protect our basic right to vote.”
After Mr. Biden won Georgia’s 2020 presidential contest, Mr. Warnock changed his tune, repeatedly describing Georgia’s 2020 general election as “free” and “fair.”
Yet old habits die hard. After Georgia passed common-sense reforms to strengthen election administration in early 2021, Messrs. Biden and Warnock teamed up to smear Georgia’s election laws. Up and down the ticket, Democrats opposed an extra Saturday of early voting, provisions prohibiting lines longer than an hour (Ms. Abrams’s group, Fair Fight, opposed this provision as a stand-alone bill in 2020 as well), and adding absentee-ballot drop boxes to the Georgia Code for the first time.
They labeled those efforts to expand ballot access “Jim Crow 2.0.” Ms. Abrams called Republicans “domestic enemies.”
What was the result of all this “voter suppression”? Record turnout in election after election and calls from Mr. Biden to move Georgia’s primary up in the calendar to make it more influential in his re-election bid. He doesn’t believe his own claims.
When Georgia saw record turnout during the three weeks of early voting for the 2022 primaries, even the Washington Post conceded that the result was “undercutting predictions” of voter suppression. Early-voting turnout for the 2022 general election also shattered records, beating 2018 by nearly 700,000 votes. The first day of early voting alone nearly doubled the first day turnout during the previous midterm. Further refuting the “Jim Crow 2.0” conspiracy theories, early turnout had a larger share of black voters than previous elections. Early voting for Mr. Warnock’s runoff election win likewise set new records.
And while the Washington Post declared that Georgia’s runoffs were “created to dilute Black power,” Georgia’s black voters were overrepresented in runoff early voting compared with their share of registered voters, and they lost fewer general-election voters than any other demographic group.
Georgia voters saw lines shorter than 10 minutes on average across the state on Nov. 8, with lines shorter than six minutes in Democrat-heavy Fulton and DeKalb counties. Although the New York Times all but wished for “long lines and wet weather” on our runoff-election day, there were short lines across the Atlanta metro area and throughout the state.
Georgia has smooth, trustworthy elections and record turnout. Voting is accessible and secure thanks to the great work of our state’s election officials. Mr. Warnock, Mr. Biden and their allies in the media—like Mr. Trump and Ms. Abrams before them—knew all along that their claims were ridiculous. Evidently they think divisive rhetoric is a good get-out-the-vote strategy, no matter how corrosive it is to democracy.
Mr. Raffensperger, a Republican, is Georgia’s secretary of state.
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