The Most Crucial Part of the New Georgia Lawsuit Is Proving GOP Intentionally Targeted Black Voters

Let our journalists help you make sense of the noise: Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily newsletter and get a recap of news that matters.

The Biden Justice Department sued the state of Georgia over its new voting restrictions on Friday—the eighth anniversary of the Supreme Court decision gutting the Voting Rights Act, which ruled that states with a long history of discrimination no longer had to approve their voting changes with the federal government. If it’s successful, Georgia could once again be covered under what remains of that landmark law.

The preclearance provision of the VRA blocked 175 proposed voting changes in Georgia from 1965 until 2013. Had it still been in place, the state’s sweeping voter suppression law, passed in March, likely “would have never taken effect,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said at a press conference on Friday announcing the lawsuit.

The Justice Department suit is relying on what remains of the VRA to try to ensure Georgia will once again have to approve its voting changes with the federal government. Specifically, a still-standing sectionof the law says that states that are found guilty by a court of intentionally discriminating against minority voters can be required to clear their voting changes with the federal government for a period of time.

discount viagra levitra Yet the world doesn’t end for people who are suffering from erectile dysfunction. Kamagra Jelly is available in a semi liquid form, available in many delicious brand cialis for sale flavors with the great strength of 100mg sildenafil citrate. At a time that was unthinkable, today, that http://icks.org/n/data/ijks/2017-3.pdf buy generic cialis is possible. viagra 5mg Often male fend off to talk openly on subject of impotency.

That’s exactly what happened in Georgia, the Justice Department suit alleges. After Black voters turned out in record numbers to elect Joe Biden president in 2020, and Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff to the Senate, Georgia Republicans targeted the very methods used successfully by Black voters and organizers. “The Georgia General Assembly intended to deny or abridge the right of Black Georgians to vote on account of race or color,” the lawsuit states.

After years of pushing Republican voters to cast mail ballots, the GOP-controlled legislature made it harder to vote by mail only after the Black share of mail voters increased in 2020 and the white share decreased. The new law prevents election officials from sending mail ballot request forms to voters, requires new ID requirements for mail ballots (Black voters represent 56 percent of voters who do not have a driver’s license number associated with their registration, but are only 29 percent of the electorate), andseverely cuts the number of mail ballot drop boxes in four metro Atlanta counties with large Black populations—from 111 in 2020 to just over 20 in future elections.