Factual reporting is so much more useful

From The voter suppression lie by Ilya Shapiro.  Shapiro is a mainstream legal scholar somewhat on the libertarian scheme of things.  

The long piece is a comprehensive and deeply empirical debunking of the lies advanced by the Democratic Party and the mainstream media about Georgia SB 202 which improved both security and access of voting in Georgia after the lessons learned of the Covid-19 disruptions of 2020.  It is astonishing how blatant lies, immediately verifiable with easily accessed public information, have been advanced by the DNC and the MSM as if people were unable and uninterested in checking on the truth.

All the details are in Shapiro's piece.  It is well worth a read to get a sense of the magnitude of raw political/ideological propaganda is now being produced by traditional media sources to explicitly shape public opinion for the benefit of one party.

It is also alarming to see how major corporations are not just going along with the lie but are joining in to exact punishments against those being lied about.  Shapiro is particularly effective at demonstrating that the new Georgia law is both more open to voting and better at securing the integrity of elections than the laws of most Democratic states.  Indeed, the more Democrat dominated the state, the more restrictive are their voting laws.  

Shapiro also points out the ultimate inconvenient fact.  Georgia is one of only two states where black registration is higher than white registration rates.  So much for Jim Crow versus Jim Eagle.

The shock goes beyond the blatant and destructive lying.  For the President to simply lie blatantly, obviously, and repeatedly calls in to question every statement that the leader of our nation makes.  The willingness to tell straight lies with no concern is deeply undermining of our trust-based system of governance.

The deep moral and epistemic corruption being paraded by Democratic leadership and the mainstream media is captured in this excerpt but the whole article is well worth reading.

Attempts by progressive groups and Democratic politicians to tie SB 202 to the era of segregation and systemic racial disenfranchisement are thus remarkably dishonest. Even the bizarre attack on the provision purportedly limiting the distribution of water to voters waiting in line is all wet. Many states have similar anti-electioneering (or anti-vote-buying) rules, which, as colorfully detailed by Dan McLaughlin in National Review, make it illegal to send “people in National Rifle Association t-shirts and MAGA hats to hand out free Koch-brothers-financed, Federalist Society-branded pizza to voters.” To again pick on the Empire State, New York explicitly prohibits giving voters “meat, drink, tobacco, refreshment or provision” unless the sustenance is worth less than a dollar and the person providing it isn’t identified. To be perfectly clear, under the new Georgia law, poll workers can still provide water to voters, and anyone can donate food and drink for election workers to set out for those waiting in line.

As for voter ID, SB 202 simply adds a requirement that voters provide the number of their driver’s license or (free) state identification card to apply for a ballot, the same as California, New Jersey, and Virginia, and one of those (or the last four digits of a Social Security number) when returning it. Surely, applying a numerical voter-verification requirement to absentee or mailed ballots is better than the inexact science (to say the least) of signature-matching. Colorado, now a solidly blue state that votes entirely by mail, rejected 29,000 ballots last fall (about 1 in 112) because the mailed signatures didn’t match those on file. That doesn’t count the 11,000 who were allowed to “cure” the issue by texting in a picture of a — gasp — photo ID. Illustrating the point further, the Tampa Bay Times just came out with an amusing article about how Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s signature has changed over the years, apparently leading to his ballot being tossed in a 2016 primary.

Voter ID more generally is hugely popular, including among Democrats ( 56% in a recent Associated Press poll) and African Americans ( 69% in a recent Rasmussen poll), despite in-person voter fraud being exceedingly rare. And majorities of all racial groups — 64% of whites, 59% of blacks, and 58% of other minorities — reject the claim that voter ID laws discriminate against certain voters. Indeed, many democratic countries require voter ID of some form, including Canada, France, Germany, India, Israel, Italy, and Sweden. As do most states with professional baseball teams, not to mention airlines and many of the other corporations now virtue-signaling about Georgia.

To top it off, the bipartisan 2005 Commission on Federal Election Reform, led by Jimmy Carter and James Baker, recommended voter ID as one of many common-sense reforms to promote election integrity. As the Supreme Court explained in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board (2008), a 6-3 decision written by the liberal Justice John Paul Stevens, such requirements are constitutional so long as the state doesn’t unduly burden the ability to get an ID. And anyway, a recent National Bureau of Economic Research study found that these provisions have “no negative effect on registration or turnout,” either overall or for any race, gender, or age group.