Georgia law sparks battle over voting rights
The fight over voting rights is emerging as one of the defining conflicts of the Biden era, and Georgia this week fired the opening shot with a set of new restrictions underscoring the political, legal and financial clashes that will influence whether Republicans retake Congress and the White House.
President Joe Biden on Friday called Georgia’s new law an “attack on the Constitution” and said the Justice Department was “taking a look” at Republican voting efforts in the state.
“This is Jim Crow in the 21st century — it must end,” Biden said, a day after Gov. Brian Kemp signed the bill into law. “I will take my case to the American people — including Republicans who joined the broadest coalition of voters ever in this past election to put country before party.
“If you have the best ideas, you have nothing to hide. Let the people vote.”
Civil rights groups immediately challenged the Georgia law in federal court, backed by prominent Democratic voting rights lawyers.
Several Black leaders described the legal skirmishes to come as an existential fight for representation, saying the law clearly targets Black and brown voters. Protests against voting restrictions unfolded this week in state capitols such as Austin and Atlanta.
In more than 24 states, Republican-led legislatures are advancing bills in a broad political effort that’s the most aggressive attack on the right to vote since the civil rights movement of the 1960s. It follows months of efforts to tarnish Biden’s presidential victory, which scores of high-level GOP officials still refuse to acknowledge as legitimate.
Georgia’s sweeping new provisions, passed by a Republican-controlled Legislature, represent the most substantive overhaul of a battleground state’s voting system since the November election. It would impose stricter voter identification requirements for absentee balloting, limit drop boxes, and forbid giving water and snacks to voters waiting in line.
But in a state where former President Donald Trump tried to persuade GOP election officials to reverse his loss, the bill went even further: It shifts the power and oversight of elections to the Legislature by stripping the secretary of state from chairing the state Board of
Elections and authorizing the Legislature to name board members.
It further empowers the state Board of Elections to have sweeping jurisdiction over county elections boards, including the authority to suspend officials.
“For anyone to believe that they can sit down and rest because the 2020 election is behind need look no further than what happened in Georgia as an indication that our work is far from over,” said Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat who’s the secretary of state in Michigan, where Republicans this week introduced numerous proposed restrictions on voting.