Survey: 0% of Black Georgia Voters Had a Poor Voting Experience

"Jim Crow 2.0," eh?

Voters fill out and cast their ballots in Columbus, Ga., Oct. 17, 2022. | Reuters

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About a year ago, President Biden, “the great unifier,” gave a speech in Georgia decrying the state’s new voter ID law in which he compared Republicans to segregationists and said they were implementing “Jim Crow 2.0” through “voter suppression and election subversion.”

And the “solution” that he and congressional Democrats were then proposing? Two sweeping Democratic voting bills federalizing a number of election rules, which Biden said would be a victory of “democracy over autocracy, light over shadow, justice over injustice.”

Biden has a history of careless claims and demagogic speeches, but he outdid himself in this instance, effectively questioning the legitimacy of America’s elections and labelling opponents of the bills as domestic “enemies” while insinuating that Georgia’s GOP leaders are inveterate racists.

His speech was only part of the hysterical overreaction to Georgia’s modest changes. Major League Baseball stripped Georgia of the All-Star Game, robbing Atlanta of millions in revenue;¹ the CEOs of Atlanta-headquartered Delta Airlines, Coca-Cola, BlackRock, and American Express chimed in with mealy-mouthed moral condemnations; progressive groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, the NAACP, and the Southern Poverty Law Center — as well as the U.S. Department of Justice — filed legal challenges.

Meanwhile, Georgia Republicans patiently explained that the Election Integrity Law was designed to increase both ballot access and security. It accomplished both.

Pretty much everything Biden said in his speech was baseless, but that didn’t stop other Democratic officials and apparatchiks from parroting his rhetoric and painting Georgia as a key state in a Republican-led conspiracy to disenfranchise minority voters nationwide.

And of course the mainstream media’s coverage was anything but restrained.

Yet despite the horrid “voter suppression,” Georgia set records in midterm elections for early voting, absentee voting, and total turnout. More Georgia votes were cast in the Senate runoff than in the general election, in the January 2021 Senate runoff, or on Election Day 2020. Moreover, a National Review analysis of Georgia election data found no evidence that black and minority voters had a harder time voting in the state.

Nevertheless, morons like Stacey Abrams, a chief purveyor of the voter-suppression allegation who led practically every Democrat in the country to believe, or to pretend to believe, her contention that discriminatory voting rules robbed her of victory in her 2018 gubernatorial race against Kemp, insisted that Georgia’s record number of voters didn’t mean that voters weren’t being suppressed.

“We know that increased turnout has nothing to do with suppression,” she said in May.

And now there’s a University of Georgia survey of 1,253 Georgia voters that found this:

Zaid Jilani @ZaidJilani

UGA poll: 0% of black respondents said their voting experience in Georgia was poor in the 2022 midterm election. Around 73% of black voters said it was excellent, equal to white voters. documentcloud.org/documents/2358…

Yup, a whopping 0% of black voters in Georgia said they had a poor experience voting. Zero.

On the positive side, 72.6% of black voters said their voting experience was excellent, which was nearly identical to the 72.7% of white voters who said the same.

In terms of the job performance of election officials, only 0.8% of black Georgia voters rated their county as poor. That compares to 1.4% of white voters.

When asked if they faced any kind of problem voting, 99.5% of black voters said they hadn’t, slightly more than the 98.7% of white voters who agreed.

On election confidence, 94.3% of black Georgia voters said they were confident their vote was counted as they intended, and 79.7% said they were confident the state counted all votes as intended. For white voters, it was 88% and 74.8%, respectively.

As far as whether it was easier or harder to vote in 2022 than it was in 2020, 19.1% of black voters said it was easier, compared to only 13.3% of white voters. The vast majority said there was no difference—72.5% of black voters and 80.1% of white voters.

The public debate surrounding Georgia’s new voting law was a toxic mix of blatant falsehoods, propaganda, and moral panic. The blame lies with the partisan distortion of Democrats, the mainstream media, and ignorant CEOs of major companies who’ve repeatedly shown they have no qualms about kowtowing to the Left.

As Georgia governor Brian Kemp repeatedly said, the whole point of the Election Integrity Law was to make it “easy to vote and hard to cheat.” This survey shows that Georgia’s elections did not “disenfranchise minorities,” and it confirms that the “Jim Crow 2.0” rhetoric spouted by Biden and the media was beyond shameful. If they had any decency, they’d admit it was wrong to cast doubt on the elections, especially during a time when public faith in America’s institutions is at an all-time low, and that no voters had been “suppressed.” They won’t, though. Their strategy was always to play the race card to justify breaking the Senate filibuster so they could jam through their election reform known as H.R.1 and overrule 50 state voting laws, which, had they been successful, really would have been a blow to democracy.

1. Recent MLB All-Star events have generated between $65 million and $80 million for the host communities, according to estimates. The CEO of Cobb County Georgia’s tourism arm estimated that MLB’s decision to move the All-Star Game to Colorado cost the local economy about $100 million.