Roughly 50% of Georgia voters have cast ballots before Election Day so far despite Democrats’ accusations that the state’s voter laws are aimed at making it harder for people to vote.
“It just shows you that they don’t know what they’re talking about,” Georgia Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, a Republican, told Fox News Digital Thursday.
“They’re just using talking points is all they’re doing. All we wanted to do is make it easier to vote and harder to cheat. And that’s exactly what we did.”
Nearly 3.6 million people, or about 50% of active voters, in the Peach State have cast ballots, either absentee or through early in-person voting, which runs from Oct. 15 through Nov. 1.
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Democrats and groups linked to Vice President Harris and Stacey Abrams have accused Georgia Republicans of making it harder to vote. (Getty Images)
Georgia voters have already shattered multiple turnout records, but that did little to temper Democratic critics of the new rules for the 2024 presidential cycle put in place by the state’s GOP officials.
“I was just in Georgia. You know they passed a law that makes it illegal to give people food and water for standing in line to vote?” Vice President Kamala Harris told a rally crowd in Michigan earlier this week. “The hypocrisy abounds. Whatever happened to ‘love thy neighbor,’ right?”
Meanwhile, President Biden called Georgia’s election security laws “Jim Crow 2.0” in 2022.
“Jim Crow 2.0 is about two insidious things: voter suppression and election subversion. It’s no longer about who gets to vote; it’s about making it harder to vote. It’s about who gets to count the vote and whether your vote counts at all,” he told an audience in Atlanta at the time.
And a group run by Stacey Abrams, who twice lost the gubernatorial race to GOP Gov. Brian Kemp, criticized Republicans for arguing there was no voter suppression in the state.
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Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp signed several election security measures over the last few years. (AP Photo/Brynn Anderson)
“We are thrilled about the strong turnout and especially the 150k newly registered voters who have already turned out, and the 70k voters who have come off the sidelines to vote this year, when they passed four years ago,” Lauren Groh-Wargo, CEO of Fair Fight, wrote on X last week.
“But that cannot excuse the fact that the GOP has put up multiple, intentional, damaging roadblocks to deter certain voters. Luckily for democracy, they’ve decided to change lanes – but Republicans don’t get credit because voters have outsmarted their bad intentions.”
She said GOP officials’ positivity about the state’s turnout is “all gaslighting” and “patently wrong.”
Georgia’s Republican-majority legislature passed several laws since 2020 to increase security around the voting process after the Peach State was thrust under scrutiny in the previous presidential race.
Among them were measures to expand the ability to challenge voter eligibility, a rule limiting ballot drop boxes based on population size and, perhaps most notably, a measure forbidding political organizations from handing out food and drinks to voters waiting in line within a certain distance from a polling place.
Election workers are, however, permitted to set up self-serve water stations.
Roughly 50% of active voters in Georgia have already cast ballots. (Megan Varner/Washington Post)
Among the Republicans to push back on Democrats’ criticism of the rules was Gabriel Sterling, the chief operating officer in the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office.
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“So over 50% of the turnout for 2020 has already voted in Georgia. So for people like Joe Biden & Stacey Abrams, you were wrong saying we had voter suppression here. It’s easy to register & vote in Georgia…and really hard to even try to cheat,” Sterling posted on X Oct. 25.
And Kemp called out Harris for her criticism of Georgia’s rule on water and food.
“Sounds like Kamala Harris just can’t handle the truth,” Kemp posted on X.
“We made it easier to vote and harder to cheat in Georgia. As a result, more than 3 million Georgians have already voted — that’s 3 million more votes than the Vice President got in the 2024 primaries.”