The hysteria against the multiple efforts to resolve the massive insecurity of elections in the US, following the largely unregulated expansion of mail-in voting during the pandemic, has reached a new high — or perhaps best expressed as a new low. Attorney General Merrick B. Garland and the head of the DOJ Civil Rights Division Kristen Clarke filed a lawsuit Friday against the law passed in Georgia earlier this year. This is one of dozens of new laws being introduced in 48 states to restore oversight over the electoral process, which saw evidence of massive fraud presented in many states following the November presidential election.
Garland told a press conference: “Recent changes to Georgia’s election laws were enacted with the purpose of denying or abridging the right of Black Georgians to vote on account of their race or color, in violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.”
This is preposterous, even by the DOJ’s own account of the issues with this supposedly “racist” law. The lawsuit lists as evidence:
“banning government entities from distributing unsolicited absentee ballot applications; the imposition of costly and onerous fines on civic organizations, churches and advocacy groups that distribute follow-up absentee ballot applications; the shortening of the deadline to request absentee ballots to 11 days before Election Day; the requirement that voters who do not have identification issued by the Georgia Department of Driver Services photocopy another form of identification in order to request an absentee ballot without allowing for use of the last four digits of a social security number for such applications; significant limitations on counties’ use of absentee ballot drop boxes; the prohibition on efforts by churches and civic groups to provide food or water to persons waiting in long lines to vote; and the prohibition on counting out-of-precinct provisional ballots cast before 5 p.m. on Election Day.”
Any evidence of race here? Are they saying Black people are less capable of having IDs, of arranging for their own absentee ballots if they have reason to; of mailing in or delivering mail-in ballots themselves? Nor is there a word about securing elections, or the Constitution’s clear language that the states, not the federal government, run elections.
