The Justice Department is suing Georgia over a comprehensive electoral law passed by the state’s Republican-led legislature, a Congressional official said Friday, a key move by the Biden administration to counter state-level electoral restrictions in place since the 2020 election.
Attorney General Merrick B. Garland was expected to announce the lawsuit late Friday morning.
The lawsuit is among the highest-profile enforcement actions launched under the Voting Act since the Supreme Court gutted a key provision in 2013 that allowed the Justice Department to prevent states from passing laws that facilitate discrimination against voters.
The lawsuit shows that the Justice Department, under the von Biden administration, intends to use the remaining tools at its disposal to aggressively oppose government actions it regards as potentially disenfranchised minority voters.
Mr Garland said earlier this month that the ministry would use all available tools to tackle voter discrimination.
The lawsuit comes days after Republicans in Congress blocked the most ambitious federal voting law in a generation, which dealt a blow to Democrats’ efforts to get the vote. President Biden and the Democratic leaders pledged to continue working to enforce state voting laws.
The Justice Department’s lawsuit is expected to accuse Georgia law of effectively discriminating against non-white voters and is intended to show that Georgia lawmakers intended to do so.
Georgian law introduced a number of new restrictions on electoral access and dramatically changed the balance of power in the electoral administration. The bill followed an election in which Georgia, a once reliably red state, turned blue in the presidential race for the first time in nearly 40 years, followed by two quick consecutive Senate seats, moving from Republicans to Democrats.
Georgia was the epicenter of former President Donald J. Trump’s months of efforts to overturn the election results. Picking up on numerous false conspiracy theories about the Georgia elections, he went on to claim that despite three separate recounts and audits – including one entirely manual – it reconfirmed the results, was fraudulent.
Critics were quick to cry that the law was rooted in the former president’s falsehoods and intended to reverse the democratic wave in Georgia, targeting the state’s absentee voting scheme, which was approved by Republicans in 2005, but the preferred method was voting for Democrats in the 2020 election amid the pandemic.
