Attorney General Pam Bondi announced Monday the Department of Justice (DOJ) would drop the “Biden-era lawsuit that falsely accused Georgia of intentionally suppressing Black voters’ votes.”
“Contrary to the Biden Administration’s false claims of suppression, Black voter turnout actually increased under SB 202,” Bondi said in a statement. “Georgians deserve secure elections, not fabricated claims of false voter suppression meant to divide us. Americans can be confident that this Department of Justice will protect their vote and never play politics with election integrity.”
Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp signed SB 202 into law in March of 2021. The legislation expanded voting opportunities while adding a requirement for voter ID for absentee voting. The legislation set off a flurry of deliberately false and inflammatory allegations, with then-President Joe Biden calling the legislation “Jim Crow in the 21st Century.” Failed gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams called the legislation “blatantly unconstitutional” and “nothing less than Jim Crow 2.0.”
As a result, the Biden DOJ issued a lawsuit alleging the legislation violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. As detailed by The Federalist’s Margot Cleveland, the Biden-DOJ “opened its complaint by proclaiming that the Georgia legislature enacted the law ‘against the backdrop of Georgia’s history of discrimination against Black Georgians.’”
The complaint alleges “the Georgia General Assembly intended to deny or abridge the right of Black Georgians to vote on account of race or color.”
Despite the allegations, nonwhite voter turnout boomed during the 2022 midterm elections. Data from the Georgia’s Secretary of State office found there were approximately 100,000 more nonwhite voters who cast a vote during the 2022 midterm election than compared to 2018. Seventy-year-old Patsy Reid — a black woman — even told The Washington Post that she was shocked how easy it was to vote during the 2022 primaries after the left tried convincing her that Republicans would “deter us in any way possible” from voting.
“I had heard that they were going to try to deter us in any way possible because of the fact that we didn’t go Republican on the last election, when Trump didn’t win,” Reid told The Post. “To go in there and vote as easily as I did and to be treated with the respect that I knew I deserved as an American citizen — I was really thrown back.”
In fact, a poll conducted post-election found zero percent of black Georgia voters said they had a “poor” experience during the 2022 contest.
Roughly one year later, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia struck down Democrats’ request for a preliminary injunction that sought to block provisions of the law from taking effect after arguing the legislation discriminates against black voters. The suit alleged that provisions of the law limiting ballot drop boxes, increasing regulations around provisional ballots and tightening “the time frame in which voters can request an absentee ballot before Election Day” intentionally discriminated against black voters, as reported by The Federalist’s Shawn Fleetwood.
Judge J.P. Boulee ruled the Biden administration and Democrat-affiliated groups “failed to show a substantial likelihood of success on the merits as to their claims that the provisions … intentionally discriminate against black voters in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment, Fifteenth Amendment and Section 2 of the [Voting Rights Act].”
Even this past election cycle voters told CNN it was far more “easy” to vote than in previous cycles.
“Last time I voted, I voted in the city, and the lines were out the door,” Corine Canada, a black woman, told CNN. “They only had like, maybe like three people working. And so people honestly just started leaving because it was like that. Yeah, like, ‘This is too long. I can’t sit here and wait, I have to go back to work.’ But here, no, it was easy!”
Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist. Brianna graduated from Fordham University with a degree in International Political Economy. Her work has been featured on Newsmax, Fox News, Fox Business and RealClearPolitics. Follow Brianna on X: @briannalyman2
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