White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said on Tuesday that “voter suppression” and “high turnout” can take place at the same time when asked about election turnout in Georgia.
Jean-Pierre made the comments on Tuesday during the White House press briefing when a reporter asked her about President Biden’s suggestion that Georgia’s voting laws were akin to “Jim Crow 2.0,” given that the state is seeing record early voting turnout.
“And speaking generally of course, more broadly, of course, high turnout and voter suppression can take place at the same time,” she said. “They don’t have to be, one doesn’t have to happen on its own. They could be happening at the same time.”
The reporter asked Jean-Pierre whether the president had reconsidered his comments in light of the new data.
“Was President Biden wrong with his assessment of Georgia’s voting law? Where does he stand by that Jim Crow comparison?,” the reporter asked.
Jean-Pierre said that there have been a “host of anti-voter policies” that were based on the “big lie,” and said that higher turnout doesn’t necessarily mean voter suppression isn’t taking place.
GEORGIA ELECTION OFFICIAL ASKS BIDEN, ABRAMS HOW MANY RECORDS THEY NEED TO BREAK TO GET APOLOGY
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre speaks during a briefing at the White House, Wednesday, Oct. 19, 2022, in Washington.
(AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
When asked if the White House is “observing instances of voter suppression in Georgia, and other states that adopted some of these laws over the last two years,” Jean-Pierre didn’t directly answer the question.
“Look, we have seen ourselves, I just laid out we’ve seen ourselves, from what legislation, state legislation we have seen across the country that is suppressing the right to vote, and look, we believe that people should have the fundamental access to voting,” she said.
U.S. President Joe Biden speaks in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, Oct. 19, 2022.
(Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Jean-Pierre’s comments come just days after Georgia’s Secretary of State Office released numbers showing that 400,000 voters have cast ballots as of Oct. 19, a 63% increase from the same time period during the 2018 midterm elections.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger previously told Fox News Digital that the state is on track to “break records in terms of voter turnout in every category.”
“In 2018, 223,576 Georgians voted by mail for governor. So far this year, we’ve received 239,789 requests for absentee ballots, 238,356 have been mailed out,” Raffensperger said. “We’ll exceed 2018’s total for mailed-in ballots. So far we’ve been breaking the early vote record set in 2018, and we’re approaching the early vote numbers in 2020.”
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Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger speaks during a news conference on Monday, Nov. 30, 2020, in Atlanta.
Gabriel Sterling, chief operating officer of the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office, told Fox News Digital that Biden needs to apologize to Georgia for his “Jim Crow 2.0” comments.
“How many turnout records do we have to break before Stacey Abrams and President Biden apologize to Georgia?” Sterling said.
