In its first major action to combat GOP voter suppression laws, the Biden Justice Department announced on Friday that it is suing the state of Georgia over its new voting restrictions. The lawsuit was first reported by Mother Jones.
“Today the Department of Justice is suing the state of Georgia,” Attorney General Merrick Garland announced at a press conference at the Justice Department headquarters.
The lawsuit challenges a number of provisions of the law, including a ban on election officials sending unsolicited mail ballot request forms to voters, a shorter period of time for voters to request absentee ballots, new voter ID requirements for mail ballots, restrictions on the number of mail ballot drop boxes, a ban on giving out food and water to voters in line, and throwing out provisional ballots cast in the wrong precinct.
Gov. Brian Kemp has said “there is nothing Jim Crow” about the Georgia law, enacted in March, but it includes 16 different provisions that make it harder to vote and that target metro Atlanta counties with large Black populations.
The lawsuit is being overseen by Kristen Clarke, the head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, and Vanita Gupta, the associate attorney general—two longtime civil rights lawyers with extensive records litigating against new restrictions on voting.
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The Supreme Court’s 2013 gutting of the Voting Rights Act means that states with a long history of discrimination—including Georgia—no longer need to get their voting changes approved by the federal government. Since that decision, 26 states have enacted new restrictions on voting, according to an analysis by Mother Jones published on Friday. Garland said Friday that if not for that Supreme Court ruling, “it is likely that SB202 would have never taken effect.”
If successful, and assuming that SCOTUS doesn’t use this as an opportunity to gut the Voting Rights Act further (or that they haven’t already by then), this could put Georgia back under preclearance. And the stakes are obviously higher than that. You can easily see the parallels between Georgia’s SB202 and Texas’ SB7, which will get a new number in the special session. AG Garland has announced his intention to make the defense of voting rights a top priority for the Justice Department, and this is the down payment on that promise. It seems very likely that the Texas bill will end up as another installment, unless somehow the bill tanks again or gets watered down to the point where Dems can reasonably shrug and move on to the next fight. Yeah, I don’t think either of those things will happen, either. Daily Kos and the Current have more.
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