Record turnout does not prove no vote suppression
Record voter turnout in Georgia in November does not mean Republican efforts there to erect hurdles to voting had no effect.
Following up on Republicans’ current efforts in Pennsylvania (post below) and in Ohio (post on Thursday) to restrict who votes, the Brennan Center finds “the racial turnout gap was larger than any point in the past decade” in Georgia. This, despite voter participation just shy of 2018 which had the highest turnout of any midterm in the last century:
A Brennan Center analysis already revealed that the gap in turnout between white and Black voters in Georgia’s 2022 primaries was the highest it had been since at least 2014. While Georgia saw similar turnout numbers in November compared to the 2018 midterms, our new analysis shows that these racial turnout gaps persisted. In fact, although overall turnout didn’t change much from 2018, this high-level statistic obscures the fact that white turnout went up while nonwhite turnout went down, cancelling one another out, as the figure below makes clear. (See the bottom of this post for a note on data and methods.)
White turnout was 8.6 percentage points higher than nonwhite turnout in the midterm election this year — higher than any general election in the past decade, and roughly 50 percent higher than in the last two midterms.
“Do we want uninformed or unserious people voting?” Ohio state Rep. Ninon Vitale (R) wrote to a voter opposed to legislation aimed at further limiting voting. “Because the founding fathers of this country did not.”
The Ohio GOP that brags about its “secure, accurate and accessible elections” that make it “easy to vote and hard to cheat” nonetheless feels a need to make voting more inconvenient still, and in a targeted way. GOP-dominated legislatures across the country are doing the same.
North Carolina’s lame duck Supreme Court majority on Friday struck down the state’s voter ID statute (Washington Post):
“We hold that the three-judge panel’s findings of fact are supported by competent evidence showing that the statute was motivated by a racially discriminatory purpose,” Associate Justice Anita Earls wrote for the majority in the 89-page ruling. “The provisions enacted … were formulated with an impermissible intent to discriminate against African American voters in violation of the North Carolina Constitution.”
Senate Bill 824 required every voter to present one of a few specific forms of photo identification, a measure the justices ruled was passed in part to discriminate against Black voters. Despite most voters having at least one of the forms of identification, the risk of having voters suppressed was very real, they said.
Republicans will point to record turnout as proof that their vote suppression measures did not have the desired effect. But that’s like suggesting because Ginger Rogers successfully did everything Fred Astaire did, but ‘backwards and in high heels’ that she did not have to work harder.
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