Early voting for the Tuesday, November 8, 2022, General Election begins on Monday, October 17th. Absentee ballot applications are being accepted and those ballots are already being cast. You will need to submit your Voter I.D., electronically or through the mail, along with your absentee ballot. Your ballots are secret, safe, and secure, and each vote will be counted.
One former President might have you believe that our election system was gamed in 2020 and that the equipment we use is faulty and hackable. I tend to prefer dealing with facts, versus rumor and innuendo. Dominion Voting Systems (DVS) is the dominant election equipment, software, and hardware provider in 28 states, as well as Puerto Rico. Worth mentioning also is that DVS is the election vendor for Ohio, Florida, Tennessee, Louisiana, Kansas, and Missouri...all states handily won by Donald J. Trump.
And here in Georgia, we have also had another highly visible candidate and public figure suggesting that Georgia's voting system is stacked and rigged, with tactics of voter suppression. Democratic gubernatorial nominee Stacey Abrams has softened her verbiage more recently but still contends that the gubernatorial contest of 2018, which she lost narrowly for Governor, was unfair and caused by a flawed and broken system of disenfranchisement and voter suppression.
I am of course going to again stick to the facts. Georgia voter turnout in every demographic set records for turnout and hard vote count totals, during 2018 and again during 2020. President Joe Biden received more votes than any Democratic candidate in Georgia history, and U.S. Senator David Perdue set a similar record on the GOP side. Virtually every demographic category also saw surges in registration, with African-American registration in both cycles exceeding their percentage of the Georgia population.
Shortly after losing the Governor's race in 2018, which Ms. Abrams never actually conceded, she filed or sponsored a series of lawsuits, through multiple non-profits which she founded and for several years led including Fair Fight Action and Vote America. Both entities recently lost their days in court to the Georgia Secretary of State. Each piece of litigation challenged a variety of aspects of Georgia election law, ranging from how voter registration lists are updated and maintained (as required by state and federal law), to how precinct boundaries are drawn and which precincts remain open or closed (decisions made by local county Boards of Election), to the exact match requirements of signatures and voter identification for ballot integrity.
It took years for these suits to wind their way through federal courts, and on September 30, 2022, U.S. District Court Judge Steven Jones ruled that Georgia election law does not violate Georgia voters' Constitutional Rights. Stevens, an Obama Administration appointee wrote in his 288-page decision, "Although Georgia's election system is not perfect, the challenged practices violate neither the U.S. Constitution nor the Voting Rights Act."
Judge Stevens added that the actual "...burden on voters is relatively low," and that Fair Fight Action did not provide "direct evidence of a voter who was unable to vote, experienced longer wait times, or was confused about voter registration status."
Translating and cutting through a bit of that legalese, the Judge is pointing out that after dozens of witnesses, and reams of testimony of anecdotal harm and injury to our democracy and voting rights...the Plaintiffs could not actually present one single person who was actually unable to vote.
President Trump and his supporters went roughly 0-60+ in their court losses to this point, across the country, but Fair Fight Action and its peers just received similar smackdowns in their litigation against Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and Georgia Election law. Our democracy is not at risk. We set voter turnout records again this year in Georgia during the General Primary and Runoff elections for midterm election cycles. New voter registration has again been surging, with the cutoff for new registrants this week for the November 8th General Election.
Donald Trump and his Stop the Steal sycophants still cause many to question the security of our election systems and the integrity of election results. That is both harmful and wrong. Ms. Abrams's litigation may have had better intentions, but she now knows in the eyes of the courts, her arguments have also been flawed, light on fact versus allegation, and also undermine voter confidence in the integrity of voting and our elections.
And two wrongs certainly don't strengthen Voting Rights either. Congratulations to Secretary of State Raffensperger and the people of Georgia, our republic and democracy remain safe and secure. Now go vote.
