The Unfalsifiable ‘Voter Suppression’ Hypothesis

C onservatives have recently made the logical point that the record-breaking early-voter turnout in Georgia this cycle disproves the malicious lie that Georgia’s recent election-integrity bill was a voter-suppression effort. Jonathan Chait’s new column takes issue with this argument.

To his credit, Chait admits that the rhetoric of some of his progressive counterparts has been hyperbolic: “Republicans do have a point here that Democrats exaggerated the effects of the Georgia voting restrictions. It was not, as President Biden hyperbolically labeled it, ‘Jim Crow on steroids.’ . . . Even by modern standards, Georgia’s law is relatively mild.” But, he continues, “there is also an irony in conservatives pointing to high voter turnout as vindication.” For this point, he cites some recent conservative columns, including a Corner post that I wrote this weekend, noting the recent record-breaking voter turnout. According to Chait, high voter turnout is “exactly the outcome” that the GOP has “tried to prevent.” Moreover, voter-turnout numbers alone are not a refutation of the voter-suppression allegation:

The early results in Georgia are consistent with the outcomes of other voting restrictions. Evidence suggests voter suppression has little effect on turnout, because Democrats mobilize in response to restrictions, canceling out much or all of the suppressive effect.

But this dynamic reveals a paradox at the heart of the defense of voting restrictions. The reason voting restrictions are failing to restrict the vote is that Democrats are making a big deal of the fact that Republicans are trying to make it hard for their voters to cast ballots. Republicans wish to not only defend the laws but to stop the criticism. The only way to defeat these laws is to loudly attack them, yet the very act of doing so allows conservatives to turn around and claim the attacks were lies.

This, my friends, is what those of us in the rank punditry business call an “unfalsifiable hypothesis.” The reason that turnout went up, according to Chait — and nebulous “evidence” that he doesn’t deign to cite — is that Democrats rang the alarm about voter suppression. Those allegations might seem improbable, given the scant evidence for the claim, but the only reason for said lack of evidence is that the evidence-free allegations were made in the first place. The only reason our lie turned out to be a lie is that we lied.

To reiterate: There isn’t any proof that suppression occurred, or that the intent of the Georgia law was to suppress votes, or that it had any material effect on Georgians’ ability to vote; or that any of the hysteria about its targeting of nonwhite voters, in particular, ever came to fruition. In fact, as Jim Geraghty pointed out in response to the May primary returns in the Peach State, “not only is the overall early voter turnout higher than ever before, but the early vote among minorities is higher than ever before.” But all that, Chait argues, is because progressives loudly alleged that suppression was happening. Chait’s brief admission that the widespread “Jim Crow 2.0” smear went too far is followed, almost immediately, by an implicit defense of such hyperbole — yes, alleging that our political opponents are worse than segregationists may have been a little over the top, but it was necessary to do so to stop them from acting like segregationists, at least when it came to their nefarious voter-suppression designs.

What if we applied this circular logic in the inverse? Chait surely rejects the idea, popular in some segments of the Right, that the 2020 presidential election was marred by widespread fraud on behalf of Joe Biden. “Even to refute the accusations of fraud is to grant them more dignity than they deserve,” he scoffed in November 2020.

There is no evidence of systemic voting fraud — and not even any evidence of small-scale fraud. To a first approximation, the net effect of all Democratic voting fraud in the 2020 election is zero . . . Even if every last one of Trump’s bizarre accusations proved correct, they would not come close to accounting for Biden’s margin of victory.

Ah! But you see, that was simply because Trump and his allies spent months in the lead-up to the 2020 election “making a big deal of the fact” that universal mail-in balloting and last-minute unconstitutional changes to election laws in some states were going to make it easier for Democrats to cheat Republicans out of the White House. “The only way to defeat these laws is to loudly attack them,” as Chait once put it. “Yet the very act of doing so allows” progressives “to turn around and claim the attacks were lies.” If the alleged fraud wasn’t enough to account for Biden’s margin of victory, it’s only because Republicans “mobilize in response to” fraud, “canceling out much or all of the” fraudulent effect.

See how this goes? There’s no limit to the amount of evidence-free claims you can make if you take the truth of such claims as a first principle and reason backward from there. For Chait and the other progressives who are still determined to defend the voter-suppression lie in Georgia, any and all evidence to the contrary is simply repurposed as more evidence in favor of the premise.

Yesterday, I pointed out on Twitter that the alleged suppression of minority votes in Georgia was “clearly not enough to prevent those groups from repeatedly breaking all-time records for voter turnout — including in the Democratic primaries — since the Georgia election law went into effect.” In response, the left-wing political strategist Dante Atkins shot back: “And turnout could be even higher without votes being suppressed, which is kind of the point.”

So if turnout decreases, it’s proof of voter suppression; but if turnout increases, it’s also proof of voter suppression, given that turnout could be even higher. I’m starting to understand how this works.