From Mother Jones:
In its first major action to combat GOP voter suppression laws, the Biden Justice Department will announce on Friday that it is suing the state of Georgia over its new voting restrictions, a source familiar with the litigation told Mother Jones.
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.
The Georgia law appears to have been part of a coordinated national effort by conservative activists to make it harder to vote in states across the country. The dark money group Heritage Action for America bragged in a leaked video to donors in April, first reported by Mother Jones, that the Georgia law had “eight key provisions that Heritage recommended.” Those included policies restricting mail ballot drop boxes, preventing election officials from sending absentee ballot request forms to voters, making it easier for partisan workers to monitor the polls, and restricting the ability of counties to accept donations from nonprofit groups seeking to aid in election administration.
The Washington Post is confirming this:
The Justice Department will file a federal lawsuit Friday against the state of Georgia for its efforts to enact new voting restrictions that federal authorities allege discriminate against Black Americans, according to people familiar with the matter.
The legal challenge takes aim at Georgia’s Election Integrity Act, which was passed in March by the Republican-led state legislature and signed into law by Gov. Brian Kemp (R). The law imposes new limits on the use of absentee ballots, makes it a crime for outside groups to provide food and water to voters waiting at polling stations, and hands greater control over election administration to the state legislature.
Attorney General Merrick Garland and Kristen Clarke, head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, will make the announcement later Friday alongside others who worked closely on developing the lawsuit, including Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta and Principal Deputy Assistant Pamela Karlan, the people familiar with the matter said. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because the action has not been formally made public.
Just now from The New York Times:
The Justice Department lawsuit is expected to accuse the Georgia law of effectively discriminating against nonwhite voters and seeks to show that Georgia lawmakers intended to do so.
The Georgia law ushered in a raft of new restrictions to voting access and dramatically altering the balance of power over election administration. The law followed an election that saw Georgia, a once reliably red state, turn blue for the first time in nearly 40 years in the presidential race, followed by two quick successive Senate seats flipping from Republican to Democratic.
Georgia was the epicenter of former President Donald J. Trump’s monthslong effort to overturn the election results. He seized on numerous false conspiracy theories about the Georgia election, and continued to claim that it was rife with fraud despite three separate recounts and audits — including one conducted entirely by hand — reaffirming the results.
DOJ live now addressing the lawsuit:
Some more info from BuzzFeed News:
Garland noted the significance of the Shelby County v. Holder anniversary in his remarks announcing the Georgia lawsuit, urging Congress to restore the “invaluable” preclearance tool and saying that it’s unlikely Georgia would have succeeded in adopting the voting restrictions now being challenged if they’d had to go through that process. According to Garland, the Justice Department had blocked Georgia from enforcing more than 175 proposed election laws while Section 5 was in effect.
Clarke accused state lawmakers in Georgia of passing SB 202 “through a rushed process that departed from normal practice and procedure.”
“These legislative actions occurred at a time when the Black population in Georgia continues to steadily increase, and after a historic election that saw record voter turnout across the state, particularly for absentee voting, which Black voters are now more likely to use than white voters,” Clarke said. “Our complaint challenges several provisions of SB 202 on the grounds that they were adopted with the intent to deny or abridge Black citizens equal access to the political process.”
The lawsuit challenges sections of the law that prohibit election officials from mailing out absentee ballot applications unsolicited; shortening the period of time for voters to request an absentee ballot and the deadline for those applications; impose fines on outside groups that send follow-up absentee ballot applications; and impose what Clarke described as “unnecessarily stringent” identification requirements to get an absentee ballot.
The suit also challenges provisions that would reduce the number of drop box sites for ballots. In the 2020 election and the 2021 runoff, there were more than 100 such sites in the metropolitan Atlanta area, but under the new law there would be roughly 20, she said.
By making it harder to vote absentee, Clarke said the law would force people to go in-person, and she cited studies that Black voters are more likely to face longer lines. The federal lawsuit challenges a part of the law that bans groups from distributing food and water to people waiting in line.
“These changes come immediately after successful absentee voting in the 2020 election cycle, especially among Black voters. SB 202 seeks to halt and reverse this progress,” Clarke said.
Finally, Clarke said the lawsuit will challenge a part of the law that would disqualify provisional ballots that voters cast at a location that isn’t their assigned precinct. Notably, the US Supreme Court is poised to decide a case soon about a similar law passed in Arizona, which was struck down in the lower courts as discriminatory.
Kemp and the Georgia GOP think this is going to help him win back a pissed off GOP base:
Sources close to Kemp described the DOJ's actions as a positive development for the governor, who has spent months defending himself against Donald Trump and the former President's push to overturn the 2020 election results. Now, Kemp has a more preferable opponent: the Biden administration.
"Gifts come in all sorts of packages these days," one person close to Kemp told CNN of the DOJ's lawsuit.
In March,
Kemp enacted the law, which includes new voter identification requirements for absentee ballots, empowers state officials to take over local elections boards and limits the use of ballot drop boxes. At the time, the first-term Republican was facing pressure from the right to tighten up the state's voting laws after Georgia went blue in the 2020 presidential race and the Senate runoffs.
The bill -- dubbed the "Election Integrity Act" and pushed amid a Republican-led effort to change voting laws nationwide -- was viewed as an attempt to quell a conservative revolt against the governor. It quickly became a rallying cry for voting rights advocates. Led by Kemp's 2018 opponent, Democrat Stacey Abrams, activists had launched their own lawsuit over the law. The law prompted backlash from corporations and even saw Major League Baseball relocate this summer's All-Star Game from Atlanta to Denver in protest.
But Kemp and allies in conservative media pushed back on the liberal reaction, accusing corporate America and the MLB of going "woke" and bringing to light more restrictive voting laws in progressive states -- a move that Republicans in Georgia tell CNN helped rally the GOP troops around Kemp.
Nevertheless, Republicans in the state remained wary of Trump, who continued to focus his ire on Kemp, deriding him as a "RINO" and threatening to back a primary challenger to him in 2022. While Trump's team has struggled to find someone to take Kemp on, Republican operatives have expressed concern over how the former President's rhetoric would affect Kemp's reelection bid, bracing themselves for a potential visit by the former President to the state in coming months.
And this fucking guy doesn’t deserve anymore praise:
Secretary Raffensperger also released a statement slamming the lawsuit as the Biden administration spreading misinformation about Georgia's law, saying he looks forward to "beating them" in court:
“The Biden Administration continues to do the bidding of Stacey Abrams and spreads more lies about Georgia’s election law. Their lies already cost Georgia $100 million and got the President awarded with four Pinocchios. It is no surprise that they would operationalize their lies with the full force of the federal government. I look forward to meeting them, and beating them, in court.”
FYI:
Vice President Harris on Wednesday met virtually with Stacey Abrams and other voting rights advocates to figure out how to move forward after a sweeping elections bill stalled in the Senate a day earlier.
Harris hosted leaders from the NAACP, the AFL-CIO, the Center for American Progress, Black Lives Matter, the American Federation of Teachers and several progressive groups. The discussion, she said, would focus on strategies for passing federal legislation and building grassroots coalitions to protect and strengthen access to the ballot box.
"The right to vote is fundamental to our democracy," Harris told the group. "And when we look in particular at the challenges, at the attempts to attack our democracy and most recently one of the most vivid, outrageous examples being Jan. 6, we know that our democracy is under attack in many ways and that we must preserve the promises of a democracy, including appreciating that the right to vote is fundamental to that democracy. That truth remains."
The meeting came one day after the For the People Act, a voting rights bill passed by the House and championed by the Biden White House, failed to get the 60 votes required in the Senate to overcome the legislative filibuster.
I’ll keep updating this but let’s help Georgia Democrats and grassroots organizations keep up their fights to keep voters engaged. Click below to donate and get involved with these Georgia Democrats campaigns and these organizations: