Civil rights groups file lawsuit over Georgia’s sweeping voter laws

ATLANTA (NewsNation Now) — Civil rights groups filed a federal lawsuit against Georgia’s newly-passed sweeping voting laws, which include new restrictions on voting by mail and greater legislative control over how elections are run.

The lawsuit was filed Monday by the American Civil Liberties Union, NAACP Legal Defense and other civil rights groups against Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and other Georgia election officials.

Kemp signed S.B. 202, the sweeping Republican-sponsored overhaul of Georgia’s elections laws, last week. The Republican changes to voting law in Georgia follows record-breaking turnout that led to Democratic victories in the presidential contest and two U.S. Senate runoffs in the once reliably red state.

Among the changes, the new law requires a photo ID to vote absentee by mail, after more than 1.3 million Georgia voters used that option during the COVID-19 pandemic. It also cuts the time people have to request an absentee ballot and limits where ballot drop boxes can be placed and when they can be accessed.

The law also reduces the timeframe in which runoff elections are held, including the amount of early voting for runoffs. And it bars outside groups from handing out food or water to people in line to vote.

The lawsuit says the state violates Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and infringes on Georgian’s’ rights under the 1st, 14th and 15th Amendments.

Democrats and voting rights groups said the law will disproportionately disenfranchise voters of color.

“Legislators and Governor Kemp ignored the very obvious lessons from the election in 2020 and runoffs in 2021: expand safe and secure access to the ballot, codify innovations to voting, and provide additional resources to cash-strapped counties,” said Nancy Abudu, deputy legal director for the SPLC in a release Tuesday. “Instead, to appease conspiracy theorists and amplify deadly lies about past elections, Georgia’s leaders have chosen to pass into law S.B. 202, which makes it more difficult for every Georgian — but particularly Georgians who are members of historically disenfranchised communities — to vote in a safe, secure, and convenient manner and have that vote counted.”

The law also replaces the elected secretary of state as the chair of the state election board with a new appointee of the legislature. It also allows the board to remove and replace county election officials deemed to be underperforming. That provision is widely seen as something that could be used to target Fulton County, a Democratic stronghold covering most of Atlanta.

Republican Rep. Barry Fleming, a driving force in crafting the law, said that provision would only be a “temporary fix, so to speak, that ends and the control is turned back over to the locals after the problems are resolved.”

President Joe Biden last week called the voting overhaul “an atrocity” and “Jim Crow in the 21st century.“

“It’s an atrocity,” Biden told reporters Friday. “They passed a law saying you can’t provide water for people standing in line while they’re waiting to vote. You don’t need anything else to know this is nothing but punitive, designed to keep people from voting.

You can read the full lawsuit below: