DOJ suing Georgia over new voting laws

It starts with the law’s reason for being. After the November election, Donald Trump insisted that he lost Georgia (among other states) because of widespread voter fraud, an accusation that melted on contact with reality before it dissolved in the legal system. Still, many Republican legislators seemed to agree with the former president—or at least seemed to sense that their voters agreed with him—and directed their ire toward absentee ballots used by 1.3 million Georgians. This year, the Georgia General Assembly passed a law meant to address this harmful conspiracy theory.


Democracy is complicated, but voting should be simple. You register; you get a ballot by mail or at a polling station; you check a box and deliver the ballot; your vote is counted. While the Georgia law isn’t all bad, it complicates almost every step in the voting process, especially for absentee voters.


Under the new law, registration is harder: An ID rule requires absentee voters to provide the number of their driver’s license or an equivalent state-issued ID. Formerly, they could just sign their name on the application. Requesting a ballot is harder too: Georgians had six months to request an absentee ballot in 2020; with the new law, they have only about three months. And delivering a ballot is harder: The law slashes the number of drop boxes in several urban and suburban areas; metro Atlanta, for instance, had 94 in 2020 but will have only 23 going forward. (Conservatives argue that the law requires drop boxes for the first time, and Democratic counties in Georgia will likely have more drop boxes than they did in 2016. But Georgia Republicans are straightforwardly making it harder to vote absentee just months after Trump falsely accused these ballots of being the source of a voter-fraud fantasy.)


For in-person voters, the Georgia law isn’t as restrictive. Most important, it expands early-voting periods. But the law does little else to reduce Georgia’s infamous long queues, and it even has a strange provision that outlaws offering water to a voter within 25 feet of the line or 150 feet from the polling station. Altogether, the law makes absentee voting harder, funneling citizens toward in-person voting that, on Election Day, may be a bit more parched and a bit more painful.

The most ominous provision of the law affects the final step in the voting process: the official count. The new law removes the Georgia secretary of state as chair of the State Election Board and allows the GOP-controlled legislature to handpick his replacement. “This issue is potentially pernicious,” Richard Hasen, a law and political-science professor at UC Irvine, told me. “The reason you didn’t have a total meltdown in Georgia last year is because you had a heroic secretary of state and a group of election administrators behind him who were not willing to mess with the fair counting of the vote. If this law had passed, there would have been other decision makers who would have had power to mess with the vote.”