Kylee Zempel of the Federalist compares facts to rhetoric in analyzing turnout for Georgia’s elections.

Remember when our president claimed that Georgia’s election-integrity law was “Jim Crow on steroids”? And his vice president insisted similar laws were voter suppression because rural bumpkins don’t have “Kinkos” or “OfficeMax” and thus can’t possibly be expected to figure out how to photocopy their IDs?

Now that Georgia’s early primary voting turnout has blown tallies from the last few elections out of the water, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are pretty quiet. So are the rest of the corporate media, which dutifully parroted the narrative that the Peach State’s push for election security represented Republican efforts to kill democracy with vicious racism.

According to Georgia’s secretary of state, 857,401 people voted in the state’s 2022 midterm election, including almost 800,000 of them in person by the end of early voting on Friday. By the end of early voting in 2020, the number of in-person voters was 326,351, and in pre-pandemic 2018 that number didn’t even break 300,000.

That makes this midterm tally a pretty dramatic spike. But even more impressive is the rise in the number of non-white voters, of which approximately 100,000 more voted early compared to 2018.

How could it possibly be that early voting significantly increased, especially among minorites, under a Republican regime of racist “Jim Eagle” suppression? There must be some mistake if we are to believe any of the media’s apocalyptic predictions from back when Georgia added simple safeguards while expanding voting locations and early voting, such as limiting electioneering in polling-place lines and requiring a driver’s license or state ID number. According to the corporate press, democracy itself was hanging in the balance. …

… Democrats and their media mouthpieces blatantly lied about the intentions of their political foes and the benefits of incorporating some basic election security such as photo ID, which Americans of all races and political identifications support by clear majorities.