To be denied something to which you were entitled is a great form of injustice. For many Black Americans having to live in a time where you were denied your Constitutional right to vote seems unfathomable. That’s because for many younger Black Americans, not voting has always been a choice — not a mandate.
For months, we all heard Democrats tell blatant lies that Republican efforts to make it easier to vote and harder to cheat through election integrity laws were somehow going to suppress the Black vote in states like Georgia.
This is very serious claim, and one that I — as a Black American with familial roots in the state of Georgia — was very concerned about. To hear it from liberal talking heads, Democrat elected officials, and progressive journalists and operatives, it seemed as if the left hadn’t even read the bill they were so aggressively trashing.
The question is why? Why were Democrats so afraid of election reforms to make the process more transparent and fairer? Why didn’t the left want to ensure that our elections and votes were as safe as possible?
It doesn’t matter to me why Democrats lied about the Georgia law. What does matter to me –and so many voters across the country — is were the Democrats right? Were they telling the truth? Would we see a deep decline in Black voter participation in the first election following the bill’s signing?
The answer is, the Democrats were wrong, they lied, and Black American voters in Georgia turned out to vote in greater numbers than 2018 – the last midterm election before the Georgia election law was implemented.
There were no signs of voter intimidation. Black people were not passing out because of dehydration in the line to vote. Simply put, Black voters were not suppressed—Black voters surpassed 2018 voting totals. Preliminary results show that102,056 more Black voters had cast early votes in Georgia’s primary elections this year than in 2018 — this was more than three times the number of Blacks that had cast early votes at the same time in 2018.
What Democrats did not account for — but what I knew would happen — was an increase in Black voters casting their ballots for Republican candidates. In the recent Georgia Primary four times as many Black voters cast GOP ballots early this year.
That increase in early voting was not limited to the Black community. Hispanic American early voting was three times higher than in 2018, and turnout for Asian American Georgia voters was 2.7 times higher than in 2018, before the voting law was passed.
The bottom line is Democrat claims were proven to be false. Once all the tabulations are done the turnout will most likely be even greater. Rather than spreading a false narrative about Republicans — costing the state an estimated $100 million in revenue, when the MLB All Star Game was moved out of Atlanta because of the lie about the commonsense election integrity law — Democrats should have focused on producing solutions to all these crises facing Americans not just in Georgia but nationwide.
Democrats have been unable to provide real solutions for the baby formula crisis, rising gas prices, inflation, crime, fentanyl deaths, and our dangerous open border.
Republicans are giving voters something to vote for, change, and an opportunity to get things done for everyone like we did under President Trump. Today, Republican Governors like Brian Kemp are working hard to remind us of what conservative leadership looks like.
Despite the best efforts from the left, their scheme backfired and now more Americans are going to be open to supporting more election reforms. That’s because when voters look at smart election laws like Georgia’s, they can see there’s simply no voter suppression.
Even on the issue of ballot harvesting in the state of Arizona, liberal plaintiffs tried to say minorities were being discriminated against because of the law eliminating the practice but they failed to show one example of that in court. The ban was upheld. Now we see Democrats in New York trying to allow non-citizens to vote in our elections, which is why the RNC is fighting that in the courts. Allowing non-citizens to vote is wrong and makes a mockery of our democracy. It’s also insulting to those American citizens who fought so long and hard to have this precious right to vote.
To get more of the truth about what the RNC is doing to make it easier to vote and harder to cheat please go to protectthevote.com.
Paris Dennard is the National Spokesperson and Director of Black Media Affairs for the Republican National Committee (RNC). Follow him on Twitter: @PARISDENNARD.