Another Win for Election Integrity in Georgia

For the past several years, Georgia has been a focal point of disputes over the extent to which states can enact and enforce policies designed to ensure that it is easy to lawfully vote and difficult to cheat. President Biden infamously claimed that Georgia’s election reforms impose “Jim Crow 2.0” through voter suppression, and compared support for such measures to support for segregation, slavery, and the Confederacy.

Unlike the arena of political speeches, however, the judicial process requires actual evidence to back up such claims. Two recent court decisions in Georgia have exposed the great extent to which the accusations leveled against Georgia have been baseless. First, President Biden’s unsubstantiated claims failed and now Stacey Abrams' claims have come up short in court.

As we recently noted, a judge denied a motion for a preliminary injunction in a set of cases that includes a Biden Administration lawsuit. In that case, the ACLJ, on behalf of more than 647,000 of our supporters and 57 Members of Congress, filed an amicus brief that emphasized the states’ constitutional authority to protect the integrity of their elections. The judge in that case noted that “a state need not wait for damage to its election system to implement corrective measures.”

In a different case, a judge recently issued a 288-page decision entering judgment for the state of Georgia. Shortly after Stacey Abrams lost the 2018 election for governor, an organization that she founded (Fair Fight Action) sued Georgia officials in federal court, asserting that various Georgia voting requirements violated federal law and the U.S. Constitution.

Early in the litigation, the judge dismissed many of the organization’s claims, including those concerning the removal of voter names from rolls, precinct closures, long lines at polling places, poll worker training, and voting machines. The claims addressed by the court’s recent decision included accusations that the state’s citizenship verification, absentee-ballot cancellation, and voter-list maintenance processes were discriminatory.

The court’s decision in Georgia’s favor stated, “Although Georgia’s election system is not perfect, the challenged practices violate neither the constitution nor the [Voting Rights Act]. . . . [F]ederal courts are not ‘the arbiter[s] of disputes’ which arise in elections; it [is] not the federal court’s role to ‘oversee the administrative details of a local election.’”

The court also stated that “Plaintiffs have not provided direct evidence of a voter who was unable to vote, experienced longer wait times . . . or experienced heightened scrutiny at the polls due to [their missing ID required] status.” The plaintiff’s lack of evidence was not due to a lack of trying; there was a 21-day trial consisting of several dozen witnesses. There was simply no merit to the allegation that Georgia imposes unlawful or discriminatory burdens upon lawful voters.

The court decisions in Georgia’s favor are consistent with a long line of Supreme Court precedent (discussed in our congressional amicus brief) that holds that “[t]here is no question about the legitimacy or importance of the State’s interest in counting only the votes of eligible voters. . . . [T]he ‘electoral system cannot inspire public confidence if no safeguards exist to deter or detect fraud or to confirm the identity of voters.’”

The ACLJ will remain active to defend the states’ constitutional authority to ensure that elections are free and fair.