Democrat incompetence leads to 'voter suppression'

Karl Rove:

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Democratic candidates have taken up the cry. Texas state Sen. Royce West, who’s seeking the party’s U.S. Senate nomination, cited Georgia in declaring “the GOP knows their only path to victory involves suppressing the vote.” Vice presidential hopeful Stacey Abrams blamed Georgia’s Republican secretary of state for the “unmitigated disaster” in the primary.

When Kentucky officials announced that Tuesday’s primary would be held with fewer than 200 polling locations rather than the normal 3,700, even King James—basketball legend LeBron—tweeted, “This is SYSTEMATIC RACISM and OPPRESSION. So angry man.” He’d earlier written that Georgia’s primary raised the question “if how we vote is also structurally racist.”

The problem? Votes weren’t suppressed.

The Georgia primary turnout was the largest in state history. While Kentucky’s results won’t be announced before June 30, officials there also expect to beat the state’s record, from 2008. It hardly sounds as if the vote was suppressed. But even if it were, the ex-president and the NBA megastar would be wrong to blame Republicans.

In Georgia, counties run elections. They set polling places, allocate voting machines, mail absentee ballots, recruit and train election workers, supervise Election Day and tally the results. The problems in the Georgia primary were centered in Fulton and DeKalb counties. Fulton contains Atlanta, while DeKalb includes the largely black suburbs directly east.

Democrats control both the Fulton and DeKalb county governments. DeKalb’s board of commissioners consists of six Democrats and one Republican. Fulton’s has four Democrats and three Republicans. DeKalb board chairman Steve Bradshaw and Fulton chairman Robb Pitts are African-American Democrats.

The commissions in turn elect chairmen of boards of registration and elections. Both counties’ election boards consist of two Republicans and three Democrats, including their Democratic chairmen. It was these Democrat-run county governments that ran the elections that Mr. Obama, Mrs. Clinton and other progressives savaged as Republican voter suppression efforts.

In Kentucky, the reduction in the number of precincts and expansion of mail-in voting were both due to coronavirus concerns detailed in an executive order signed by the state’s Democratic governor, Andy Beshear. The elections were also run by counties.

Louisville, Kentucky’s biggest city, has a consolidated city-county government. The mayor is a Democrat, while the county clerk is a Republican. They centralized in-person voting at a 1.2-million-square-foot convention hall with 350 socially distanced voting stations. Yet with massive numbers of mail-in ballots, voter participation surged. Other than a rush before the 6 p.m. close, wait times were low at the convention center. There were more problems in Fayette County, home to Lexington, the state’s second most populous city. The county’s executive, clerk and most of its elections board are Democrats.
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Just as the violence in Democrat-controlled cities is because of a failure to deal with it on a local level, so the alleged voter suppression.  In both cases, it is a product of Democrat incompetence compounded by projection to blame someone else.