VIEW

We listened to Stacy Abrams, who made the Democratic response, to President Trump’s State of the Union address.

It was the typical left-wing harangue, applauding socialist policies, which any reasonable person should know by now don’t – and never have – worked.

Ms. Abrams was the failed governor candidate in Georgia.

Among her socialist meanderings, failing to mention anything to back up her claims, about the wondrous attributes of socialism-communism-progressivism (whatever), she pinpointed the reason for her loss of the Georgia’s governor’s race as voter suppression.

She claimed Georgia is ready to flip to the Democratic column except for the unfair election system, which keeps people who would vote for her away from the polls.

Maybe she was talking about illegal migrants in the country, more and more of whom aren’t looking for opportunity, but rather free government handouts financed by taxpayers.

She obviously has the same attitude as recently-elected New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who quaintly explains the solution to providing “free” stuff to oppressed people as simply spending government money. Poor A-O-C hasn’t been around long enough for her frontal lobe (the one that allows people to have sound judgment) to develop. She doesn’t seem to realize somebody has to pay.

A-O-C has gotten so wall-eyed even Democratic leaders are pulling away from her. She’s an embarrassment.

Hans von Spakovsky, senior legal fellow in the Heritage Foundation’s Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies and manager of the think tank’s Election Law Reform Initiative, took exception to Abrams’ allegations about voter suppression, saying a close look at the facts is in order. He writes:

It never has been easier to register to vote in Georgia. In fact, by the time of the election that Abrams lost three months ago, the state had 6,935,816 registered voters, the most in Georgia’s entire history.

Turnout rates kept pace with the rise in registration. Abrams’s own website cites an article from ABC News that said minority voters in Georgia’s governor race made up 40 percent of total turnout. And in an all-time high for the state, three of every four of those minority voters were black.

This is an astonishing turnout, given that the 2017 census estimate for Georgia shows that blacks make up 32.5 percent of the population, and Hispanics make up 9.6 percent. Those percentages include residents under 18, noncitizens, and other individuals who are ineligible to vote.

In fact, minority turnout in 2018 surpassed minority turnout in 2014 by 4 percentage points. Abrams’ Fair Fight Action group also cites a statistic that shows she received the most Democrat votes of any candidate in Georgia in nearly a decade. No one was kept out of the polls – Abrams just couldn’t convince enough Georgians to vote for her, a truth she doesn’t want to admit.

As for making it “harder” to stay on the voter registration rolls, Georgia uses a verification tool to check the accuracy of its rolls that is fully compliant with the National Voter Registration Act, something that also is required by the Help America Vote Act.  Ohio’s use of a similar process was approved by the U.S. Supreme Court last year in the case of Husted v. Philip Randolph Institute.  

In Georgia, registered voters receive an identity/address confirmation notice if they don’t vote for three years or the Postal Service indicates they have moved. If they fail to return this notice, they are marked as “inactive” on the registration list.

Voters are removed from the voter rolls only if they fail to vote in two more general elections after the notice was sent out.  And voters listed as “inactive” are still able to vote if they show up at their polling place; anyone improperly removed is still able to vote with a provisional ballot.

After pointing out numerous other fallacies in Abrams’ comments, von Spakovsky observed:

“If (Brian) Kemp, (former secretary of state and now governor of Georgia after beating Abrams) is a voter suppressor as she claims, he is surely one of the most inept ones in history.”

There seems to be a thread here, and this is it: if a left-winger fails to win an election, he (or she) was cheated.

It seems likely the Democrats could hardly have picked a worse spokesperson for their response, even though Ms. Abrams is considered an up-and-comer in the Democratic ranks.

She was using her position to attack efforts to safeguard elections in this nation.

In a campaign speech, Abrams claimed that the “blue wave” of Democrat voters would be comprised of both the “documented and undocumented.”

Undocumented is the politically correct, liberal term for illegal aliens.  

We have our voting credentials checked every time we go to vote in Kingfisher County and think everyone else should, too – even in Georgia.

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We read recently that Democrats are shopping around for a party candidate to run against C-A-O in New York because her outlandish comments are hurting them with voters.

They may be too late. The cat is already out of the bag. C-A-O may have destroyed the Democratic Party. Oh, we forgot, Pelosi, Feinstein, Schumer, et al, beat her to it.