Brouhaha Over the Georgia Voting Law

It's astonishing to see how corporations, which just a decade or two ago were the boogeymen of Democrat mythology, have now become that party's BFFs. The Democrats have within the space of a few years become the fat cat party and Republicans are now the party of the working man.

Who'd have thought twenty five years ago that that would happen?

The Wall Street Journal's Kimberly Strassel describes a good example of obsequious corporate genuflection to the progressive agenda can be found in the behavior of Delta Airlines CEO Ed Bastian who has seized upon the Georgia voting reform legislation to ostentatiously place his moral virtue on public display.

Unfortunately for Mr. Bastian, as well as for Major League Baseball, Coca Cola, Big Tech, all the way up to President Joe Biden, none of the folks condemning the Georgia law appear to know what they're talking about.

Strassel writes:

According to Delta CEO Ed Bastian, there is only one reason Georgia passed a voting reform: to suppress the votes of black Americans and other minorities. Georgia’s Republican Legislature used the “excuse” of voter fraud to “make it harder for many underrepresented voters” to “exercise their constitutional right to elect their representatives,” Mr. Bastian wrote this week in a memo to employees.

Mr. Bastian has plenty of company in the C-suites. Some 72 black executives, including the CEO of Merck and a former CEO of American Express, signed an open letter calling on corporate colleagues to fight “undemocratic” and “un-American” GOP efforts across the states to “assault” the “fundamental tenets of our democracy.”

Coca-Cola, Microsoft and Apple chimed in, and dozens more are readying outraged press releases.

They're eager to voice their moral outrage at the Georgia legislature for their allegedly bigoted attempt to suppress the black vote, but their umbrage serves as a good lesson on why it's wise to check your facts before strutting your moral superiority for everyone to admire.

You suffer much less embarrassment that way and don't look nearly as stupid:

Thus the sight of the nation’s top business leaders monotonously reciting a fact-free narrative. As they know, state legislatures are moving to reaffirm longstanding rules and restore confidence in electoral systems that were arbitrarily remade during Covid.

ID requirements are no more racist at the ballot box than on a Delta flight. Some 36 states have them, and they’ve been upheld by the Supreme Court.

Mr. Bastian’s moralizing memo fails to cite a single one of the supposedly “egregious measures” in the bill that will suppress the vote, although he does stress he hears his employees’ “pain.” The letter from the 72 executives misstates the Georgia rules, suggesting the only way to satisfy the ID requirement is with a driver’s license, even though “200,000 Georgians lack a license.”

In fact, voters can also use a free, state-issued nondriver ID, and those who lack one can fulfill the requirement with a Social Security number or even a copy of a “current utility bill, bank statement, government check, or paycheck.” The letter suggests the Georgia “playbook”.... is of a piece with “police dogs, poll taxes, literacy taxes.”

One can only hope Merck is more rigorous when conducting pharmaceutical trials.

When people in my state present themselves to receive the Covid vaccine they have to show proof of eligibility, and as far as I know no one has complained that that's racially discriminatory. Why then is it racially discriminatory to require proof of eligibility in order to vote?

If there's racism afoot in requiring an ID of some sort it's on the part of those progressives who think so little of minority voters that they don't believe them capable of mustering the wherewithal to secure a free ID.

And then there's Major League Baseball whose commissioner Rob Manfred was so outraged at this almost completely innocuous legislation that he's decided to punish many innocent Georgians, including a lot of black Georgians, by yanking the All-Star game from Atlanta. Mr. Manfred must figure that depriving average citizens of the 100 million dollars of income the game would've brought to their businesses is an effective way to show those Georgia legislators how awful they are and how righteous he is.

Unfortunately, President Biden has done nothing to help clarify what Georgia has actually done and has instead thrown gasoline on the fire by demonstrating that he either doesn't know what he's talking about (plausible) or that he's deliberately trying to deceive the American people (equally plausible).

In what appears to be a ridiculous pander to the far left-wing of his party, a wing which perhaps he finds more congenial than he let on during the election campaign, he repeatedly misrepresented the Georgia law and encouraged MLB, and by extension, all American corporations, to boycott Atlanta.

Glenn Kessler at the Washington Post (The Washington Post!) has in fact given Mr. Biden four "Pinocchios," the maximum possible, over his misrepresentations of the Georgia reforms. Ed Morrissey at Hot Air fills us in:

Here are the two Biden statements with which Kessler takes specific issue:

“What I’m worried about is how un-American this whole initiative is. It’s sick. It’s sick … deciding that you’re going to end voting at five o’clock when working people are just getting off work.” President Biden, in remarks at a news conference, March 25.

“Among the outrageous parts of this new state law, it ends voting hours early so working people can’t cast their vote after their shift is over.” Biden, in a statement “on the attack on the right to vote in Georgia,” March 26

In fact, as Kessler explains, the bill does neither of those things. It doesn’t change the voting times at all on Election Day, which was 7 am – 7 pm before the new bill passed and will still be 7-7 afterward.

It doesn’t change the rule that people who get in line by 7 pm are allowed to vote even if polls close; that’s still the case, too. Some of those ideas were discussed, but none made it into the final version of the bill. Neither did ending early voting on Sundays.

Contrary to what Biden claims, the bill actually expands early voting time:

"One of the biggest changes in the bill would expand early voting access for most counties, adding an additional mandatory Saturday and formally codifying Sunday voting hours as optional. Counties can have early voting open as long as 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., or 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. at minimum.

If you live in a larger metropolitan county, you might not notice a change. For most other counties, you will have an extra weekend day, and your weekday early voting hours will likely be longer."

The previous version of the law set the times for early-voting locations as “normal business hours,” which was interpreted as 9-5. Counties now have to provide that at a minimum, but could choose to extend those hours as they see fit.

The biggest changes to Georgia law had nothing to do with polling times, but with the absentee-ballot process. Access to that did get significantly restricted on timing, but not on eligibility, although the law also puts new restrictions on third-party groups trying to register people for absentee voting

. Even those changes are hardly Jim Crow-esque, as Biden painted them in his presser:

Mail-in absentee voting will look the most different for voters, especially after 1.3 million people used that method in the November general election. Voters over 65, with a disability, in the military or who live overseas will still be able to apply once for a ballot and automatically receive one the rest of an election cycle. But the earliest voters can request a mail-in ballot will be 11 weeks before an election instead of 180 days — less than half as much time.

The final deadline to complete an application is moved earlier, too. Instead of returning an application by the Friday before election day, SB 202 now backs it up to two Fridays before. Republican sponsors of the bill and local elections officials say this will cut down on the number of ballots rejected for coming in late because of the tight turnaround....

State and local governments are no longer allowed to send unsolicited applications, and third-party groups that send applications have new rules to follow, too. Their applications must be clearly marked as being “NOT an official government publication” that it is “NOT a ballot,” and must clearly state which group is sending the blank request.

Plus, third-party groups are only allowed to send applications to voters who have not already requested or voted an absentee ballot. The groups potentially face a penalty for each duplicate sent.

In fact, as anyone who cares about the truth could easily ascertain, the Georgia law is less restrictive than the voting laws in very liberal New York and President Biden's home state of Delaware. Does Mr. Biden think the legislators of those states are sick bigots?

Moreover, the Georgia law is certainly less draconian than the voting laws in Communist China which President Biden's own State Department has accused of committing genocide against its Muslim Uighur population. So, will the president encourage a boycott of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics?

Of course not. But no matter. Mr. Biden may be a mendacious, hypocritical nincompoop, but he's not that nefarious Trump, and to our Democrat friends that's evidently all that matters.