Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp this week defended the state’s new voter integrity law, Senate Bill 202, this time before a national audience.
This, as certain right-leaning news outlets called out Democrats for grossly mischaracterizing the law and what it does.
Kemp appeared on The Guy Benson Show, a podcast that Benson hosts for listeners in all 50 states.
“First of all, this is a manufactured crisis from those that are profiting off of it, and the bill does, as we’ve always tried to do in Georgia and that’s make it easy to vote, hard to cheat, doing really common sense things that I think will make our elections even smoother in the state of Georgia, replacing the signature match with the voter I.D., which is free in Georgia, by the way, securing drop boxes around the clock, which didn’t exist before this legislation that I signed the other day,” Kemp told Benson.
“Common sense things like requiring poll workers to continue tabulating ballots until all votes are counted and then expands voting access, especially on the weekends. And it’s amazing that people are against those common sense measures.”
The Washington Post, in a fact-checking analysis, said that the new Georgia law “did make some changes to early voting. But experts say the net effect was to expand the opportunities to vote for most Georgians, not limit them.”
In an opinion piece, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) editorial board criticized U.S. President Joe Biden and other Democrats for comparing the new Georgia law to Jim Crow.
“Democrats aren’t smearing Georgia because they believe their ‘Jim Crow’ nonsense,” according to the WSJ editorial board.
“Their strategy is to play the race card to justify breaking the Senate filibuster, so they can jam through their election reform known as H.R.1 and overrule 50 state voting laws.”
National Review Senior Writer Dan McLaughlin, meanwhile, wrote that SB 202 “is the right direction.”
“While you would not learn this from the Democrats or their sympathetic media coverage, S.B. 202 actually takes steps to fix those long lines. Georgia law previously allowed the state to override local election officials and require them to add more precincts or voting machines if people were left standing on line for an hour after the polls closed,” McLaughlin said.
“S.B. 202 expands that authority, so that the state can step in and require more polling places or voting machines if voters in overcrowded precincts face lines of an hour or more at any of three measured intervals during the day.”
As The Georgia Star News reported Monday, Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel defended Georgia SB 202, which Democrats nationwide have described as a form of voter suppression. She said “Democrats are peddling a false narrative in order to dismantle our elections processes, and the Georgia election reforms expose that lie because the bill actually EXPANDS voting opportunities.”
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Chris Butler is an investigative journalist at The Tennessee Star. Follow Chris on Facebook. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “People Voting” by Wyofile Wyofile. CC BY 2.0.
