Ignore Trump and Dems: Georgia elections among fairest in nation
Georgia Republicans braced for the worst when President Trump recently teased a major announcement on election security. Given his sordid history of disputing Georgia’s 2020 election results — and the role those claims may have played in Republicans losing the state’s two Senate seats — many feared he would once again target the state’s elections.
During his primetime TV address earlier this month, Trump stopped short of declaring Georgia’s current senators illegitimate, but he continued casting doubt on the integrity of American elections. Despite his frequent tirades and claims of stolen elections, every audit and lawsuit has shown that our elections are fair and legitimate. If any compelling evidence existed proving otherwise, his lawyers would have presented it in the courts long ago, but they never did because it doesn’t exist.
This comes against the backdrop of many on the political Left calling Georgia’s voting laws Jim Crow 2.0 and an attempt to suppress voting. While the Left has griped about our voting laws and Trump has been busy re-litigating old grievances, new reports show that Georgia has one of the country’s best and most trustworthy elections systems.
“In an era when confidence in elections is too often shaped by partisan rhetoric rather than proven results, Georgia has taken a different approach: Build the nation’s gold standard for election administration and prove its success at every election,” Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger noted in a recent op-ed. “Confidence in the system can’t be dictated from above. It is earned through transparency, accountability and results. That’s the standard Georgia has set, and that’s the standard we will continue to uphold.”
Some readers may respond that these are just the empty claims of a politician, but Raffensperger has reason to project this confidence. Following Georgia’s June 16 primary run-off, his office conducted a couple audits to ensure the results were correct. “1,111,856 ballot images were audited, and 23 discrepancies were detected, demonstrating an overall accuracy rate of 99.9979%,” reads a Secretary of State press release.
“Detailed analysis of the data shows that the 23 discrepancies all occurred in ballots that [had] been marked by hand, while none of the 1,079,408 ballots utilizing a ballot-marking device showed discrepancies,” the release continued. “The machine-marked ballots were 100% accurate, while the hand-marked ballots were 99.93% accurate.”
As my friends at Peach Pundit noted, this is a little misleading. “Some of the errors came from hand-marked ballots, while our machines also misassigned votes, attached the wrong electronic records, and repeated a programming failure we already saw in DeKalb four years ago,” Peach Pundit’s Scot Turner noted.
Regardless of how the secretary of state presents the 23 discrepancies, no election is perfect. Voters are guaranteed to make weird mistakes and machines aren’t completely free of errors. What the audit shows, however, is that Georgia’s system is highly accurate and there are processes in place to quickly identify and address any possible discrepancies. What’s more, Georgia witnessed record voter turnout in the May primaries — suggesting that the Jim Crow 2.0 attacks were not only unfair but patently untrue. This should provide Georgia voters with ample confidence.
If that still isn’t enough, then consider a recent study from one of my R Street Institute colleagues, elections expert Chris McIsaac. He conducted a 50-state survey and ranked each state by how well they administer elections. “This scorecard,” he wrote, “identifies and evaluates states on a set of policies that are especially important for conducting elections worthy of public trust.” The study considered six policies including those governing voter eligibility, verifying voter identities, voter registration, voter list maintenance and vote tabulation and audits.
While the scorecard found that states across the board do a relatively good job at elections administration, Georgia scored the highest and is tied with Florida, Ohio and Utah for the top spot. There is always room for further improvement, but again, this should inspire faith in our elections and undercut unfounded claims of voter suppression and stolen elections no matter what naysayers assert.
Trump will likely always hold a grudge against Georgia and claim the 2020 election was stolen, and similarly the Left may continue to hate Georgia’s Republican-led elections administration. While claiming fraudulent elections or voter suppression grabs headlines, the data doesn’t support such accusations. Rather it clearly demonstrates that Georgians should feel confident in their elections.