#The ‘fight’ for voter rights is nothing like the Civil War

If this is Joe Biden when he’s forceful and passionate, the country is better off with the passive and detached version.

The president gave a thunderous address in Philadelphia on Tuesday denouncing alleged Republican voter suppression. Playing on the darkest fears of Democrats and layering on the adjectival overkill, Biden blatantly distorted Republican state-level election laws in a frankly demagogic speech.

Biden rightly excoriated former President Donald Trump, if not by name, for his conduct since the election. But he also lashed the Republican election bills. The approach seems designed to mirror Trump’s effort to undermine his side’s faith in the electoral process with a countervailing effort to undermine Biden’s own side’s faith in the electoral process.

Indeed, if Democrats lose in 2022 or 2024, Biden’s speech may be seen by Democrats as providing an equally corrosive excuse: It was Republican voter suppression.

According to Biden, the GOP election rules are one of the most grievous affronts to our democratic rights ever. “The 21st-century Jim Crow assault is real,” he said. “It’s unrelenting, and we’re going to challenge it vigorously.”

He called this push “the most serious test of our democracy since the Civil War,” making sure to note that the statement wasn’t hyperbole, even though it’s hard to imagine a more hyperbolic assertion.

Half the country left the union during the Civil War, threatened Washington with periodic armed raids and fought for its independence in a war that killed more than 600,000 people, which obviously doesn’t bear comparison to, say, passing voter-ID laws.

At one point, Biden referred to “Georgia’s vicious anti-voting law.” Yet the law was fully debated and refined in the legislative process. The result is well-crafted legislation that is not anywhere close to hearkening back to Lester Maddox.

The law increases the hours available for early voting and preserves ballot-drop boxes, an emergency measure adopted during the pandemic, although it tightens the rules around them. It dispenses with signature match, which voter-rights advocate Stacey Abrams has criticized as unreliable, to verify absentee ballots; instead, it asks that voters provide a driver’s-license or state-ID number.

Long lines at polling places have been a perennial complaint in Georgia and, it must be said, largely the responsibility of Democratic-run local jurisdictions. Where lines are an endemic problem, the new law mandates that counties either reduce the size of the relevant precincts or add new equipment or workers.

Provisional ballots are tricky for election administrators to handle, and Abrams has long complained that they aren’t reliably counted. The law seeks to reduce the number of provisional ballots by diminishing a leading reason people vote provisionally, i.e., that they show up at the wrong precinct. Going forward, election workers will direct such voters to the correct precinct.

In the same spirit, the law says voters can’t request absentee ballots later than 11 days prior to the election — because many absentee ballots are rejected for arriving too late.

Even if you oppose every single one of these measures, Georgia will still have a notably open election system, with online registration, extensive early voting and no-excuse absentee voting.

Biden either doesn’t realize this or doesn’t care — in other words, he’s either being recklessly irresponsible or deeply cynical (and probably both).

The presumption that marginal changes in election laws measurably affect turnout, a key assumption of the Democratic case against GOP election bills, is simply erroneous. Voter-ID laws haven’t suppressed turnout.

Biden is unlikely to get the Democratic election bill, HR1, over the finish line. But the charge of voter suppression is a powerful partisan motivator. He made an implicit nod in this direction when he said, “We’ll engage in an all-out effort to educate voters about the changing laws, register them to vote and then get the vote out.” Never mind that this wouldn’t be possible under a new Jim Crow.

When it comes to juicing up his own supporters, the Biden speech may have been effective, but it wasn’t statesmanship — or remotely truthful.

Twitter: @RichLowry