Fact Check: The Georgia Voting Bill

Now that Major League Baseball has made headlines for planning to move the All-Star Game out of Atlanta (costing black-owned businesses millions in lost sales), you might be wondering what is so offensive about Georgia’s recent changes to voting laws (in the omnibus Senate Bill 202) that it would prompt such a severe and politicized reaction.

Here are the “major” changes Georgian lawmakers adopted:

• The window to request an absentee ballot was changed from 180 days prior to the election to 11 weeks, and an absentee ballot application must be received two Fridays before the election instead of the Friday before.
• Requesting and returning a ballot will require ID – either driver’s license, state ID, or an acceptable voter ID.
• Third party groups sending ballot applications must clearly mark the mailing as “Not an official government publication,” “NOT a ballot,” and identify what group is sending the request.
• Counties can expand early voting with a mandatory Saturday and optional Sunday for voting before election day.
• People other than poll workers are disallowed from passing out food and drink to voters waiting in line (to avoid the appearance of attempting to sway votes).

Yes, these are the changes that “Put y’all back in chains” Joe Biden described as “Jim Crow on steroids.”

There are many other smaller changes, but the above changes have been shamelessly misrepresented by politicians and leftists in the media as somehow restricting voting freedoms when the new provisions actually expand voting freedom and security in the state of Georgia. Even the always-liberal Washington Post fact-checked the bill and found it actually expands voting access.

Perhaps the most shameless and racist argument against Georgia’s new provisions is the claim that requiring ID to vote is somehow discriminatory against African-Americans. While this insulting and demeaning proposition has been widely debunked, Democrats in government and media continue to insist that African-Americans are somehow unable to obtain legal identification.

Major League Baseball should be embarrassed at their ignorant and downright racist reaction to what are clearly common sense voting rules. Their decision will cost Atlanta-area businesses (many of which are black-owned) millions in lost business, all to placate Democrat lies about Georgia’s new voting laws.