By Glynn Wilson –

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The United States Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against the state of Georgia on Friday accusing the Republican controlled legislature of intentional discrimination for passing a voting law with strict constraints on ballot drop boxes that would bar election officials from sending absentee ballot applications to voters, reduce the time to request absentee ballots and add identification requirements for voting by mail.

The case was hailed as a “significant move” on the voting rights front by the Biden administration to challenge state-level ballot restrictions enacted since the 2020 election and a political chess move against Senate Republicans who just used the filibuster to block the most ambitious federal voting rights legislation in a generation.

“The rights of all eligible citizens to vote are the central pillars of our democracy,” Attorney General Merrick B. Garland said in a news conference at the Justice Department announcing the suit. “They are the rights from which all other rights ultimately flow.”

The legal complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, says the Georgia law, passed in March, clearly discriminates against African-American voters and it shows that state legislators intended to violate their rights. Several of the law’s provisions “were passed with a discriminatory purpose,” said Kristen Clarke, the head of the department’s civil rights division, at the news conference.

The case is among the most aggressive efforts to expand or preserve voter protections in years.

In 2013, the Supreme Court overturned a key provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that allowed the Justice Department to stop states from passing laws viewed as facilitating voter discrimination, and the Biden administration is signaling an intent to restore that federal power in the courts.

President Biden and Democratic leaders pledged to continue working to steer federal voting rights legislation into law and to escalate pressure on states and Republicans, and Biden is reportedly planning speeches on the subject in key states in the days ahead warning against a threat to the democratic process and comparing it to Jim Crow laws in the post-Reconstruction South.

The complaint also shows that this administration intends to invoke the remaining Justice Department tools to aggressively fight state actions that potentially disenfranchise minority voters.

“This lawsuit is the first of many steps we are taking to ensure that all eligible voters can cast a vote, that all lawful votes are counted and that every voter has access to accurate information,” Garland said. He also called on Congress to give the department more help in the form of voting rights legislation.

The department is also moving to tackle increasing threats to election officials and poll workers, he said, and mentioned creating a task force to investigate and prosecute those cases as well.

The case could take years to resolve in the courts, and it was attacked immediately by Georgia Republicans, twisting the boundaries of truth in calling it political.

“The D.O.J. lawsuit announced today is legally and constitutionally dead wrong,” Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, said on Friday in a news conference in Savannah, Ga. “Their false and baseless accusations are quite honestly disgusting,”

Georgia was one of the states at the core of President Donald Trump’s effort to overturn the election results, grasping at false conspiracy theories about the outcome, insisting falsely that it was rife with fraud in spite of three recounts and audits, including one conducted by hand, that all reaffirmed the accuracy of the outcome.

Kemp, who is trying to stave off a Republican primary challenger after refusing to acquiesce to Trump’s demands to overturn the election results, tried to use the lawsuit to animate the Republican base.

“They are coming for you next,” he said. “They’re coming for your state, your ballgame, your election laws, your business and your way of life.”

Some voting rights experts expressed confidence in the Justice Department’s chances of rolling back Georgia’s voting restrictions, noting its strong record on cases that focus on lawmakers’ intent.

“When the Department of Justice undertakes a case of this nature, it’s done its homework and is familiar with facts that are not even usually publicly reported,” said Chad Dunn, the legal director of the UCLA Voting Rights Project. “So I believe when the Department of Justice brings a case like this, it has what it needs to meet its evidentiary burden.”

But others expressed caution, pointing to the current conservative makeup of the federal judiciary, according to The New York Times.

“It will be an uphill battle,” said Allison Riggs, the director of the voting rights program at the Southern Coalition for Social Justice. “But I don’t think it’s a foregone conclusion that it’s a no-go because I think the Georgia bill was bad and there is less justification than ever before for some of these changes.”

Georgia became a key battleground state in 2020 after three decades as a reliably conservative red state, and turned blue for the second time in 40 years in the presidential race and in runoffs that flipped its Senate seats from Republicans to Democrats. All were close victories attributable in part to Black voter turnout, one-third of the state’s population, and the more liberal voting options at the time.

The law changed elements of voting that had contributed to those Democratic victories and would suppress minority turnout, the suit alleges.

“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.

Critics denounced the law as rooted in Trump’s falsehoods and accused state Republicans of seeking to undo the Democratic wave in Georgia.

President Biden called it an “un-American” attack on voter rights that amounted to “Jim Crow in the 21st century” and promised the Justice Department would examine it.

“Democrats in Washington are struggling to find an effective strategy for countering laws like Georgia’s that are advancing this year through more than a dozen Republican-led state legislatures,” the Times says in its analysis. “Party activists and policymakers have mostly pinned their hopes on narrow majorities in Congress, where Democratic leaders have insisted they will work through the summer to try to pass a meaningful expansion of voting rights and protections against election subversion tactics by partisan state officials.

“Democrats have framed the battle as existential, and progressives are plotting a pressure campaign this summer to try to persuade senators to eliminate the legislative filibuster to allow them to act without Republican support.”

Senator Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat from Minnesota, plans to take her influential Rules Committee to Georgia in the coming weeks to convene a field hearing on criticism of the new law.

Democrats in the House and Senate also plan to push through the fall to put forward other federal legislation to strengthen the Voting Rights Act, to reinstate the provision struck down by the Supreme Court in 2013, which requires states with a history of discrimination to clear any voting changes with the Department of Justice. Any such bill will face stiff opposition from Republicans, especially in the Senate, who argue that discrimination is no longer a factor in voting.

The eventual resolution of the Justice Department lawsuit will likely also affect state lawmakers’ future attempts to pass new voting laws.

The Georgia law also banned mobile voter units and put stricter requirements on provisional ballots, which are votes cast in person when there are open questions about a voter’s eligibility. The ballot ensures that if the questions are resolved, the vote can still be counted. Any provisional ballot cast in the wrong precinct in Georgia before 5 p.m. on Election Day now requires the voter to instead travel to the correct one or risk being disenfranchised. Showing up at the wrong precinct was by far the most common reason for voting provisionally in 2020 in Georgia, accounting for about 44 percent of provisional ballots, according to Raffensperger’s office.

Of the 11,120 provisional ballots counted in the presidential election, Biden won 64 percent to Trump’s 34 percent.

Also, in a section that Democrats, civil rights groups and voting rights groups described as simply “cruel,” the new law bans handing out food and water to voters waiting in line. Georgia has for years been notorious for its exceptionally long lines on Election Day, especially in communities of color.