Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock appeared on CBS This Morning on December 19, 2022.
Courtesy CBS This Morning
Sen. Raphael Warnock told CBS This Morning that voter suppression was still an issue in Georgia.
He also addressed a WSJ opinion piece from Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger that called him an “election denier.”
“We can do better,” Warnock said of voting laws.
Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock doubled down Monday on his argument that voter suppression took place in his home state of Georgia despite his win in the December 6 runoff.
“We should not assume that because I won that voter suppression is not an issue in Georgia,” Warnock said during an interview on CBS this Morning of his victory against Republican Hershel Walker, a retired football player.
During the CBS interview, co-host Tony Dokoupil asked Warnock to respond to an opinion piece that ran in the Wall Street Journal over the weekend, in which Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger called Warnock an “election denier” and said his claims about voter suppression were “dangerous to public trust in elections.”
Raffensperger in his piece was referring to Warnock’s victory speech, in which he said voter suppression occurred in the state. Warnock hasn’t changed his position.
“The fact that people have had to overcome barriers doesn’t mean those barriers don’t exist,” Warnock said on Monday. “We literally saw college student and seniors in lines that were hours and hours and hours long. Maybe he’s happy with that. I’m not. I think we can do better than that.”
Raffensperger is the Republican election official who gained prominence after refusing to change the 2020 voting results in Donald Trump’s favor, amid the ex-president’s false claims of election fraud. Georgia voters reelected Raffensperger in November over a Trump-backed challenger.
Georgia Republicans passed a voting law in 2021 that expanded early voting, required identification information for absentee ballots, and restructured the State Elections Board to have more control over local election offices, among other measures. It also prohibited volunteers from voters food, water, and chairs while they wait in line.
It was widely panned by Democrats, who accused the law of targeting Black voters for suppression. President Joe Biden called it “Jim Crow in the 21st Century.”
Despite this, Georgia saw record turnout in the 2022 elections. Yet Warnock said during his CBS This Morning interview that voting laws should be improved not just in Georgia but across the US.
Warnock is one of the lead sponsors of Democrats’ voting rights legislation. The bill would nix state election restrictions to nationalize election laws — including automatic and same-day voter registration, making Election Day a national holiday, and allowing voters to present a broad set of ID cards when voting in person, among other provisions.
Democrats do not have enough votes in the Senate to pass the legislation, and while Biden has called for the Senate to temporarily set aside the filibuster and pass the bill with 51 votes instead of 60 votes, not enough Democratic senators agree even in the next Congress.
“There is nothing more sacred than the right to vote,” Warnock said on CBS. “You can have the right to vote and still not have access.”
Warnock cited a voting rights lawsuit as evidence of how voting access could improve. In November, the Warnock campaign, the Democratic Party of Georgia, and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, successfully sued so that voters could have the day after Thanksgiving, November 26, 2022, as an early voting day.
While voters elected Republicans to other statewide offices in Georgia during the midterms, Democratic voters had strong turnout during early voting. In 2020, Biden was the first Democrat to win the state since Bill Clinton’s win there in 1992.