Joe Biden publicly lied about the new Georgia voting bill and believe it or not, even the Washington Post actually called him on it.
The WaPo fact-checked Joe Biden’s false claim that the Georgia voting bill reduced the hours that people could vote on election day and gave it Four Pinocchios, a rating reserved for “whoppers.”
Biden said of the voting bill:
“What I’m worried about is how un-American this whole initiative is. It’s sick. It’s sick … deciding that you’re going to end voting at five o’clock when working people are just getting off work.”
Of course, the bill doesn’t do that. Before the bill passed, voting began at 7 AM and ended at 7 PM. Those times remain unchanged. Additionally, as even the Washington Post was forced to admit, the bill actually expanded early voting,
“One of the biggest changes in the bill would expand early voting access for most counties, adding an additional mandatory Saturday and formally codifying Sunday voting hours as optional,” Stephen Fowler of Georgia Public Broadcasting said in an excellent and comprehensive report on the impact of the new law. “Counties can have early voting open as long as 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., or 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. at minimum. If you live in a larger metropolitan county, you might not notice a change. For most other counties, you will have an extra weekend day, and your weekday early voting hours will likely be longer.”
Charles Stewart III, an election expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said: “I had also heard this generally reported as expanding early voting, so I’m surprised by the characterization.” He studied the precise language changes at our request and said it indicated an expansion of hours, especially in rural counties.
Of course, people like Joe Biden can’t say that they’re upset rural counties that tend to trend Republican will finally have the same early voting opportunities as places like Atlanta, so he just makes things up and yells about “Jim Crow.”
In 2020, Democrats got away with skewing the voting rules their way because of the pandemic. States like Georgia are now stepping up to make sure that doesn’t happen again and that is exactly what they should be doing.
John Hawkins is the author of 101 Things All Young Adults Should Know. You can follow him on Parler here.
