On Monday's New Day, CNN co-host John Berman claimed that voting rights in the U.S. are "under siege" in some states controlled by Republicans as he introduced a "Reality Check" segment by CNN analyst John Avlon.
The left-leaning CNN contributor misinformed the audience by repeating misinformation about voter purge laws in states like Ohio and Georgia as he wrongly suggested that voters could be kicked off the voting rolls simply for going a couple of years without voting.
At 7:47 a.m. Eastern, Berman set up the segment: "It has been called 'the new civil rights issue of our age,' the right to vote, and it's now under siege in several states."
Avlon began by showing cell phone video of Georgia Republican Senator David Perdue responding negatively to a student asking him a question accusing Republicans of "voter suppression." Avlon then reacted:
Now, you can see why the Senator might lose his cool here -- after all, the facts are hard to defend here. Under the guise of voter integrity -- who wouldn't want that? -- Republicans in several states are knocking hundreds of thousands of people off the voting rolls.
After noting hundreds of thousands of voters being dropped from the rolls in Georgia and Indiana, he then erroneously added: "In Ohio, a use-it-or-lose-it law where failure to vote in two consecutive elections may cause you to lose your registration."
However, as previously documented by NewsBusters, a voter must refrain from voting for about six years and also refuse to respond to an address verfication inquiry in that time before being dropped from the voter rolls.
Additionally, voters can apparently even show up in Ohio on Election Day several years after being dropped and still vote using provisional ballots if they verify that they still live in the same county as their previous registration.
In Georgia, voters are similarly dropped after seven years of not voting and failing to respond to the registrar.
After citing a few more examples, he relayed complaints of liberals -- whom he referred to as "critics" -- that the purpose of the voter purging is to "win elections by any means necessary."
He then repeated the case of Georgia's "exact match law" which CNN and MSNBC have been handwringing over since late last week that has resulted in 53,000 new voter registrations to be put on hold as "pending," and noted that almost 70 percent are African-American.
The liberal analyst did not bother to inform viewers that those 53,000 voters can still vote on Election Day if they bring their photo ID which is already required, and can even cast a provisional ballot in the absence of photo ID. He also did not mention that the reason so many African-Americans were affected was because a liberal group that targets minorities for registration allegedly made mistakes with many of its registration forms that its workers prepared.
After Avlon ended the segment by quoting former President Ronald Reagan to shame Republicans, co-host Alisyn Camerota gushed over his report:
John, that is so helpful because, as you know, Republicans so often talk about voter fraud, but when you show us the numbers, then we see that voter disenfranchisement, that numbers are so much higher. That's a bigger threat.
So CNN once again acted as more of a liberal propaganda outlet than an accurate source of information.
