Georgia voters went to the polls Tuesday in the first test of an election law Democrats said would suppress voter turnout.
Initial reports said turnout was high and problems were low.
“Now we are seeing the hard evidence that as we all knew, the hysteria was never based on fact to begin with,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said, according to U.S. News and World Report.
“It was a big lie, and the big lie is in the process of being disproven,” McConnell said, according to Axios.
Georgia voting shattering turnout records after MSNBC, CNN, others ran with ‘Jim Crow’ accusations https://t.co/UrFc38o6T6
— Fox News (@FoxNews) May 24, 2022
“It’s all quiet, and quiet is good,” Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said.
Tuesday’s in-person voting followed three weeks of early voting, in which more than 850,000 ballots were cast, according to the New York Post.
That’s an increase of 212 percent over the 2020 presidential election and an increase of 168 percent over the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial primary contest, Raffensperger said.
“The incredible turnout we have seen demonstrates once and for all that Georgia’s Election Integrity Act struck a good balance between the guardrails of access and security,” Raffensperger said.
He said the law has “been tested and it’s coming through with straight A’s,” according to The New York Times.
“We’re having record turnout. We have record registrations, and lines have been short. Everything’s really been running very smooth,” he said.
Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, who won his GOP primary, said that based on early voting trends, predictions of voter suppression were nothing more than political hot air.
“They don’t want to know what the truth is,” Kemp said Saturday. “They don’t care what the truth is. They want to talk about the narrative that drives their base and helps their political polling.”
Aklima Khondoker, the chief legal officer for the voting rights group the New Georgia Project, said just because the primary elections went well does not mean the law is not everything liberals condemned it as being, saying that such a step would be a “gross mischaracterization,” according to The Times.
As you hear about Georgia’s record turnout and easy voting, remember that the entire purpose of Georgia’s voting law was making it ‘easy to vote and hard to cheat.’
And we’re seeing that in real time.pic.twitter.com/9F8UApMwB0
— Jason Snead (@jasonwsnead) May 24, 2022
President Joe Biden had called the new law “un-American,” and its passage sparked Major League Baseball to punish Georgia by moving last year’s All-Star game.
“This is Jim Crow in the 21st century. It must end,” he said, according to The Post.
There were some glitches Tuesday in Georgia caused by balky machines, polling locations that did not open on time and voters sent to the wrong place by incorrect instructions.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.