Fact Check: Joe Biden Lies About Georgia Voting Law in Speech Against 'Jim Crow 2.0'

CLAIM: Republicans are trying to suppress the vote by barring people from access to food and water while waiting to vote.

VERDICT: MOSTLY FALSE. The new Georgia law allows voters access to water and attempts to shorten voting lines.

President Joe Biden delivered a partisan speech Tuesday in Georgia in which he claimed that Republicans were attempting to create “Jim Crow 2.0” by passing voting reforms at state level. He even hinted that Republicans were domestic “enemies.”

As one of his examples Tuesday, Biden claimed that a new Georgia law made it “illegal — think of this! I mean, it’s 2020, and now 22, going into that election — it makes it illegal to bring your neighbors, fellow voters, food or water, while they wait in line to vote.” He cited the Bible in his righteous outrage, noting that it commanded believers to provide food and drink to the needy.

In fact, as numerous fact-checkers have pointed out, the Georgia law prevents political groups from providing food and water to voters in line, because it could be considered a form of electioneering, but requires that water be made available to voters from a common receptacle. The Georgia law also requires voting precincts with long lines to take steps to shorten them.

Despite being repeatedly corrected, Biden repeated his false statement about the Georgia election law and says that it makes it illegal to give people water at polling places…https://t.co/RwBiR3R73S

— Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) January 11, 2022

…The bill allows for “self-service water from an unattended receptacle to an elector waiting in line to vote.” It does not limit any poll workers from supplying water to voters. It stops the use of water and food as a means of violating the no politicking rule after past abuses

— Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) January 11, 2022

Biden made several other false statements, including claiming that former President Donald Trump “sought to win through violence what he had lost at the ballot box,” though there is no evidence he ever used violence — quite the opposite.

(It was Biden and then-Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) who supported the unrest of the summer of 2020, with Harris joining a protest that had been violent just hours before outside the White House, and Biden referring to rioters as “peaceful protesters.”)

Biden used his speech to push for two Democrat bills on “voting rights,” both of which push partisan changes to voting.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.