John C. Ackerman, a Republican, is the county clerk in Tazewell County, Ill.

The Democratic Party and national news media have been propagating for months the fiction that election reforms in more than 20 states, especially in Florida, Georgia and Texas, are racist efforts to restrict voting rights. President Biden last week encouraged this gross misrepresentation, denouncing the laws as “21st century Jim Crow” and demanding of Republicans, “Have you no shame?”

The only shamelessness at work here is that of Democrats and their media allies.

As an Illinois election official, I would like to explore how some of the widely attacked Florida and Georgia election measures, and those pending in Texas, hold up when compared with current law in Illinois, a heavily Democratic state.

Georgia issue: The state was denounced by many for its ban on handing out food or drink to people waiting to vote. Similar laws can be found New York and Montana. But even if a state doesn’t specifically ban the practice, anti-electioneering laws, including those in Illinois, bar it implicitly. Election officials are not in a position to monitor every interaction with a waiting voter to see if it crosses the line into an attempt to influence. Illinois prohibits electioneering within 100 feet of voting sites; my policy in Tazewell County is that if you’re not there to vote and you’re not an authorized person, you’ll be asked to leave. If Donald Trump himself had shown up last fall and started handing out water bottles at a polling station, I would have had him removed.

Florida issue: The new law says that requests for vote-by-mail ballots are valid for two years, or each election cycle, rather than four years, then must be requested again. Here in Illinois, we had previously required voters to file a new request to vote by mail for every election, including primaries. Under new legislation, beginning in 2022 requesters in Illinois can now opt to join a permanent vote-by-mail list, otherwise the each-new-election rule stands.

Georgia and Texas issue: Amid the pandemic last fall, Atlanta sent buses equipped with voting booths out into the city, looking for voters. Houston began offering voting 24 hours a day. These were emergency measures that had never been used before in those states; now Georgia has ended the use of buses as mobile voting stations, and Texas plans to drop 24-hour voting. Here in Illinois, neither of these practices would be legal.

Florida issue: Election officials will be prohibited from sending out vote-by-mail ballots to voters that haven’t been requested, as happened in several other states for the 2020 election, when 44 million unsolicited ballots were sent out, according to PolitiFact. Illinois law also wouldn’t allow it.

Georgia issue: A new law specifies that each county have one ballot drop-off box per 100,000 active registered voters or one box at each early-voting location, whichever number is lower. Critics claim that not allowing a multitude of boxes in each county is an outrage. In Illinois, local election officials “may” use ballot drop-off boxes, but many counties, including mine, choose not to have any at all. In that way, Illinois is more “restrictive” than Georgia.

Florida issue: A new law bans “ballot harvesting,” in which one individual collects an unlimited number of ballots and ensures that they are cast. In Illinois, we require anyone producing a ballot other than their own to have written permission from the voter. That voter signature on the affidavit is then verified before the ballot is processed. The effect is that Illinois bars “ballot harvesting.”

If election reform efforts in Florida, Georgia and Texas are racist voter-suppression efforts, what does this say about Illinois? Illinois has had many of these laws on the books, and enforced them, for decades.

What it says about Illinois — and about Florida, Georgia and Texas — is that states have an obligation to conduct fair and efficient elections, to constantly evaluate what works best, and to occasionally revise the rules as seems appropriate.

What do the accusations about a “new Jim Crow” over the past few months say about national Democrats and the national media? That there is no tactic too low for them to use when trying to smear Republicans and keep Democratic voters angry and motivated.

This vilification campaign is insulting to anyone familiar with actual Democratic Party-driven Jim Crow laws of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And it is irresponsible for the media to uncritically echo these claims, amplifying division among Americans and sowing mistrust of the democratic process.

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