GA Elections Law 'Motivated By Discriminatory Purpose,' Feds Say In First Big-Time Voting Suit

?? Hello readers! 

Matt Shuham here again covering this week’s roundup of voting rights-related news. We saw some substantial Biden admin movement on this front last week: The federal government filed its first significant voting rights lawsuit of the new administration, suing the state of Georgia over its controversial restrictive voting law that the feds say purposefully and disproportionately impacts Black voters in the state. 
 

That law was just one in a cross-country wave of state-level legislative proposals aimed at appeasing bad faith, Trumpian calls for “election integrity” (read: ensuring Republican wins). And the struggle continued this past week in statehouses and county commission meetings from Pennsylvania to Michigan. 
 

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Alright, let’s dig in.

Feds Sue Georgia

Georgia’s new law restricted the distribution of absentee ballot applications, added ID requirements for absentee ballot users, and set a new deadline for requesting an absentee ballot -- all after Black Georgians began voting absentee at higher rates than their white counterparts in the state, the federal government noted in U.S. v. Georgia, filed Friday. It also limited drop boxes, banned handing out food and drinks to voters waiting in long lines, and restricted how ballots cast at the wrong precinct are counted.
 

>> Key quote: “The challenged provisions of SB 202 were adopted with the purpose of denying or abridging Black citizens’ equal access to the political process, in violation of Section 2 [of the Voting Rights Act].” 
 

The suit does pursue one ambitious remedy, asking a court to place Georgia under the Voting Rights Act’s “preclearance” regime, which would require that Georgia get DOJ approval before making certain changes to its voting laws. But as Vox notes, the legal challenge faces an uphill climb in an increasingly conservative judiciary. 
 

The federal government filed the suit on the eight-year anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision to gut the VRA’s primary section on preclearance, Section 5. There could be more restrictions on the VRA coming down the pike: The Supreme Court will soon rule on a challenge to Section 2, the same authority the feds are citing in their Georgia case.

Under The Surface: GOP Strips Elections Officials Of Authority

The feds’ lawsuit in Georgia doesn’t challenge every aspect of the new restrictive voting law. It actually leaves out a particularly jarring two-pronged change: SB 202 removed the secretary of state as chair of the State Election Board, instead filling the role with someone appointed by the legislature. SB 202 also allows the state board to step in and temporarily replace local elections officials who they deem to be underperforming.
 

What does that mean? The state board, now steered by the state’s GOP-controlled legislature, can insert themselves into Democratic counties’ election processes.
 

That dynamic is playing out elsewhere: As part of a larger budget bill, the Arizona legislature approved a measure to formally cut out Secretary of State Katie Hobbs from election-related lawsuits, replacing her with Attorney General Mark Brnovich (R).
 

Timing is everything: The language affecting the secretary of state’s office expires in 2023, when Hobbs’ term runs out. (She’s running for governor in 2022.)

‘It’s A False Narrative’: PA Legislature Passes Doomed Voting Bill

While Georgia’s SB 202 was a notable headline bill in the early wave of voting changes, Republican legislators around the country are working on new bills that, in some cases, don’t really stand a chance of making it into law. 
 

Take Pennsylvania, where the Republican Senate just passed HB 1300, a bill to restrict the use of drop boxes and shorten voter registration windows, among several other changes in the lengthy proposal. No matter that Gov. Tom Wolf (D) has promised to veto the measure. 
 

Why? Well, “There’s obviously a demand from the Republican base, and that’s the part of the base that believes that the outcomes of the presidential election were fraudulent,” Khalif Ali, executive director of Common Cause Pennsylvania, told me Friday. 
 

Ali lamented that some good parts of the legislation -- time for elections workers to precanvass mailed-in ballots, requirements for election worker training -- were tied to the other aspects of the bill. Notably, all of this happened less than two years after the passage of Act 77, a bipartisan voting bill that Wolf signed into law in October 2019, and which was heralded by both sides as a sensible improvement to the state’s system. 
 

“The current narrative is, ‘If I don’t get what I want through this process, then the process is broken,’” Ali observed.

The Latest In Audit Mania

Arizona is, of course, the pilgrimage site of Trumpian “audit” supporters all around the country, some of whom hope to bring the practice home.
 

“There are a lot of people who are contractors at the audit who are from Pennsylvania! I mean, I didn’t really know all this,” Republican Arizona State Senator Wendy Rogers said in one recent interview. “I thought they were all sort of home-grown from Arizona. They’re from other states. They’re on the payroll here!” 
 

In GEORGIA: Amy Kremer, chair of Women for America First and organizer of the Jan. 6 Trump rally in D.C. that turned into an insurrection, recently announced an “Election Integrity Town Hall” in Fulton County, Georgia featuring two state lawmakers who recently toured the Arizona audit, alongside Jenna Ellis, who represented the Trump campaign during its effort to overturn the 2020 election. In the same county, a judge rejected a lawsuit seeking a close-up inspection of tens of thousands of ballots from Fulton County. The plaintiffs will be stuck with digital images, which will make it harder for them to use the super-secret fake-vote-detecting software of Jovan Pulitzer, the CueCat inventor and failed treasure hunter who’s been working with the plaintiffs.
 

In WISCONSIN: The Associated Press published details from the contracts for retired cops who will lead an investigation into, apparently, any and all claims of election funk. One of the investigators once wrote a report advocating for changes to Wisconsin’s election laws -- on the basis of purported voter fraud -- that a judge was unwilling to admit into the evidentiary record for a voter ID lawsuit, because it was untrustworthy. 
 

In MICHIGAN: A report from the GOP-led Senate Oversight Committee found “no evidence of widespread or systemic fraud in Michigan’s prosecution of the 2020 election.” So we’re good, right? No: The county commission in Cheboygan, a Trump-heavy area, wrote to the Michigan Secretary of State’s office the day prior asking permission to do yet another review of the 2020 vote -- this time, “whether there is any evidence that any unauthorized computer
actually manipulated the actual presidential election vote tally within Cheboygan County.” 

“Upon receipt of the letter, the Bureau of Elections will respond directly to the Commission,” a spokesperson for Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson told TPM. 
 

And finally, ARIZONA itself, where the CEO of the company leading the “audit” of Maricopa County’s 2020 election results appeared in a conspiracy theory film, alongside Pulitzer and others, which asserts that the election was stolen.

The Washington Post: Inside the ‘shadow reality world’ promoting the lie that the presidential election was stolen 
 

The Guardian: ‘He’s phoning it in’: why Biden is losing the voting rights fight 
 

Atlanta Journal-Constitution: After cancellations, many Georgia voters re-registered and voted