More than a month after Georgia passed a commonsense voting law, which was lambasted by the left and the mainstream media, new polls show that a plurality of Americans support election integrity measures.

According to an April 30 CNN poll conducted by SSRS, 46 percent of American adults think “that the rules around voting are not strict enough to prevent illegal votes from being cast.”

On the other hand, 45 percent of American adults think “that the rules around voting make it too difficult for eligible citizens who want to vote to cast a ballot.”

The CNN poll follows a new Hill/HarrisX poll, which asked registered voters: “When it comes to voting in the US, which statement comes closest to your views?”

The results: 43 percent of respondents believe “voting laws should be stricter to prevent voter fraud.” On the flip side, 31 percent said “voting should be made more accessible” and 27 percent think voting laws “should be kept as is.”

Moreover, according to a recent article on Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight website, “the public strongly supports one of the other major stipulations of Georgia’s new law: the ID requirement for absentee voting. That latest YouGov/The Economist poll found that Americans support requiring a photo ID in order to vote absentee, 53 percent to 28 percent.”

What’s more, according to the same article, “voter ID laws — which Republicans have pushed for years — are quite popular in general. In another national poll out this week from Selzer & Co./Grinnell College, 56 percent of adults favored keeping laws that require people to show a photo ID before voting, while just 36 percent wanted to eliminate them. And this isn’t an opinion Americans suddenly adopted amid 2020’s specious claims of voter fraud. In fall 2018, the Pew Research Center found that 76 percent of Americans favored requiring everyone to show a government-issued photo ID in order to vote, versus only 23 percent who opposed it.”

Remarkably, all of these polls, which appear on liberal websites no less, tell the same simple story: More Americans think election integrity is in jeopardy than not. And most Americans believe voter ID laws, like that passed in Georgia recently, could be a bulwark against election fraud.

However, the will of the American people on this issue (and many others) seems to be falling on deaf ears in the White House, mainstream media, and those on the left, in general.

After the Georgia election integrity law passed in early April, President Biden called it “Jim Crow in the 21st Century.” Biden was not alone in his mischaracterization of the Georgia voting law.

As you may recall, a host of leftist leaders, pundits, and even CEOs came out in lockstep opposition to the Georgia voting law, perpetuating the absolutely false narrative that it is the return of Jim Crow via the GOP.

A quick history lesson. The Democratic Party, not the Republican Party, enacted what were known as Black Codes and Jim Crow laws throughout the South after the Civil War and up to the 1960s civil rights era.

And what did these Jim Crow laws do? They expressly targeted black Americans to prevent them from exercising their God-given right to vote. Throughout the “Solid South,” Democrats passed laws enacting so-called “grandfather clauses,” literacy tests, and even poll taxes.

Once again, these laws did not apply to all voters, they specifically applied to black voters only.

Fast-forward to 2021. The Georgia voting law — and many other bills under consideration in several states — requires all voters to present ID before they cast a ballot.

As the preponderance of polls show, this simple, non-racist measure is supported by more Americans than oppose it.

With the 2022 mid-terms approaching, this issue is not going away anytime soon. Although the left has dreams of passing HR 1, which would federalize elections, states still have the upper hand when it comes to making the rules regarding elections.

More states should follow Georgia’s lead on this issue, regardless of the feigned leftist outrage that is sure to follow.

Chris Talgo ([email protected]) is senior editor at The Heartland Institute.