Black voters in Georgia overwhelmingly reported positive voting experience under controversial law

The overwhelming majority of black voters in Georgia said they had a “good” or “excellent” voting experience under a new election reform law that President Biden decried as “Jim Crow 2.0” when it was enacted in 2021.

A post-election survey from the University of Georgia released last week found that none of the 364 black voters polled had a “poor” experience at the ballot box.

By contrast, 72.6% of the surveyed black voters said their experience was “excellent,” while 23.6% said it was “good” and 3.3% said it was “fair.” The remaining 0.5% said they didn’t know how to characterize their voting experience.

In addition, 99.4% of black voters said they felt safe while waiting to cast their ballot.

In March of 2021, Republican Gov. Brian Kemp signed a GOP-led bill into law that imposed restrictions on voting by mail and identification requirements while increasing legislative control over elections in the state.

Critics said the Election Integrity Act was an attempt to further marginalize historically suppressed black voters in the state — and an overreaction to former President Donald Trump’s claims that widespread voter fraud in the usually red state led to his defeat there in the 2020 election.

“This is Jim Crow in the 21st Century. It must end,” President Biden said of the measure at the time it became law.

“Instead of celebrating the rights of all Georgians to vote or winning campaigns on the merits of their ideas, Republicans in the state instead rushed through an un-American law to deny people the right to vote,” he said.

The passage of the bill led Major League Baseball to yank the 2021 All Star Game from Truist Park in Cobb County, Ga. as Democrats called for a boycott of the state economy.

The 2022 election in Georgia featured a key Senate race between two black candidates. Sen. Raphael Warnock, a Democrat, beat back a challenge from University of Georgia Heisman Trophy winner and Trump-anointed GOP hopeful Herschel Walker in a Dec. 6 runoff.

In contrast to Biden’s claims, 91.6% of black voters said voting in 2022 was either easier or had the same degree of difficulty as in 2020 — with only 6.9% saying casting a ballot was easier two years earlier.

The university surveyed 1,253 voters over the phone between Nov. 13 and Dec. 6.