Claiming this is due to “Robert E Lee’s birthday” is a complete red herring and disingenuous. Here’s what’s actually going on.
▪️In 2016, the Georgia legislature passed a bill which restricted early voting on Saturdays falling either on a holiday or following a holiday on Thursday or Friday.
https://www.legis.ga.gov/api/legislation/document/20152016/162401
▪️Next Saturday happens to follow 2 state holidays. Thanksgiving on Thursday, and a generic “State Holiday” on Friday. This used to be called “Robert E Lee’s Birthday” but was renamed in 2015. Lee’s birthday is actually on Jan 19, but Georgia traditionally celebrated it after Thanksgiving.
https://www.ajc.com/blog/politics/confederate-memorial-day-disappears-from-2016-georgia-holiday-calendars/ef2nD9pIa8itUbrEKhBbvL/
▪️Thus, even if Georgia abolished the “State Holiday” formerly known as Robert E. Lee’s birthday, the law still calls for the restriction because of Thanksgiving! The only reason to bring up Lee is to be disingenuous and misleading, without providing that context.
▪️The reason this is now an issue is because last year the Georgia legislature moved runoff elections to 4 weeks after Election Day instead of 9 weeks, which created the conflict. This even confused the Secretary of State, who initially said there would be Sat voting until his office realized the law prohibited it.
https://www.ajc.com/politics/georgia-holidays-prevent-saturday-voting-before-us-senate-runoff/Q7WG5X7T55AIJEJYLEOJ6JLQ6M/
▪️Democrats have sued Georgia, claiming that this law shouldn’t apply to runoffs, but for now the SoS has ordered no voting on the Sat following Thanksgiving per the law as written. We’ll see how the courts rule.
https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2022/nov/15/georgia-sued-over-ban-on-saturday-voting-before-us/
▪️There is still plenty of early voting opportunities, as well as absentee ballots and, of course, the normal election day voting for the runoff election. Just no early Saturday voting after Thanksgiving.
▪️This statistic is just made up. The reality is that there hasn’t been a real study on this since 2013, when Pew did a poll. They found that Democrats were actually more than twice as likely as Republicans to report ever using food stamps (22% vs 10%).
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2013/07/12/the-politics-and-demographics-of-food-stamp-recipients/
▪️Obviously, those percentages could have changed over the past decade, but it’s very likely that Dems still receive more SNAP benefits. Certainly, without an actual study or poll the claim should be thrown out, as it wildly contradicts a previous study.
▪️The meme probably comes from a 2024 analysis by Social Explorer, which found that 78.7% of US counties with the largest increase in SNAP since 2010 voted for Trump in 2020. But that tells us nothing about the actual number of Republicans (or Democrats) who are receiving benefits, just county-wide trends.
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▪️I was playing around with the new Grokipedia and it already seems much better than Wikipedia (which admittedly isn’t saying much). I was looking for a topic that is politically polarizing that I also knew a lot about, so used “Kenosha unrest shooting” to compare the two.
▪️A key component to the shooting was understanding the broader context behind the Kenosha riots and who Kyle Rittenhouse ended up shooting. Wikipedia simply says that Jacob Blake was shot by police and was paralyzed, thus unrest. Grokipedia gives a much more in-depth account so the reader can see that Blake was a serial criminal with a warrant who had a knife and was resisting arrest while fleeing with children in his car.
▪️When it comes to those who were shot, Wikipedia just gives the names and ages. Grokipedia goes in-depth on each person and about their violent criminal history and mental instability that night.
▪️Part of the left wing mythology over Rittenhouse was removing the context and ...
