From [HERE] The Biden administration sued the state of Georgia on Friday, alleging its new voting law aims to restrict the rights of Black voters, marking the administration’s first such challenge to Republican-backed efforts in multiple states to tighten voting laws.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Atlanta, alleges that Georgia violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act when it earlier this year enacted changes to the state’s election requirements, including altering how people cast absentee ballots and where people can drop off their ballots.

Republican Gov. Brian Kemp signed the new law in March after it was passed by the GOP-dominated legislature. Republicans said the changes amounted to common-sense efforts to restore confidence among voters in the integrity of Georgia elections following the 2020 presidential vote, in which some absentee-voting provisions were loosened. 

After the vote, then-President Donald Trump made unfounded claims of election fraud and pressured a top Georgia election official and a staff member to reverse his loss in the state.

“Many of that law’s provisions make it harder for people to vote,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in announcing the new lawsuit, adding: “The rights of all eligible citizens to vote are the central pillars of our democracy.”

Georgia Republicans were quick to criticize the federal lawsuit. 

“This lawsuit is born out of the lies and misinformation the Biden administration has pushed against Georgia’s Election Integrity Act from the start,” Gov. Kemp said on Twitter. 

House Speaker David Ralston said: “Georgia’s Election Integrity Act makes voting more accessible and secure. We will vigorously defend our system of free and fair elections.”

The Justice Department’s suit takes particular aim at the changes that the state law, known as SB 202, makes to absentee voting, including those that prohibit election officials from distributing unsolicited absentee ballots, and those that limit the number of drop boxes for those ballots. Georgia Republicans have defended those provisions as a course correction after absentee-voting rules were loosened during the pandemic, leading to an increase in absentee voters in 2020. 

In its 46-page lawsuit, the Justice Department noted that more than 29% of Black voters cast an absentee ballot, compared with less than 24% of white voters in Nov. 2020.

“Like all of the provisions in SB 202, the changes to absentee voting were not made in a vacuum. These changes come immediately after successful absentee voting in the 2020 election cycle, especially among Black voters,” Kristen Clarke, the assistant attorney general for the civil-rights division, said. 

A Supreme Court ruling expected next week could have a broad impact on voting-rights law and potentially on the Justice Department’s new case. The justices have been considering whether certain voting rules from Arizona violate Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which says states can’t impose any rule “which results in a denial or abridgment” of the right to vote on the basis of race. It is the first Supreme Court case to specifically address how that provision applies to voting regulations. 

Voting-rights plaintiffs have turned to Section 2 in the years since the high court in 2013 effectively invalidated another provision of the act that had been a key tool for targeting voting rules in states with a history of discrimination. 

The lawsuit against Georgia comes two days after Senate Republicans blocked Democratsfrom moving ahead with elections legislation, forcing the party to try to devise a new way forward after weeks of intraparty wrangling and fruitless calls from progressives to advance the bill without GOP support. 

It also comes weeks after Mr. Garland said his agency would scrutinize a raft of new state election laws, promising to double the number of staff devoted to enforcement of federal voting-rights law. On Friday, he said the department was evaluating other states’ recent changes to election rules and could bring other similar lawsuits.

Also Friday, Mr. Garland said the Justice Department was setting up a new task force to address an increase in violent threats directed at state election officials.

The Georgia law requires absentee voters to request ballots by providing their driver’s license number, the last four digits of their Social Security number or a copy of some other accepted form of identification. They also have to provide this information when they mail in their ballots. Before the law, voters would sign an absentee-ballot application and sign the ballot when they mailed it in.

The law also placed new limits on how parties and voting groups mail out absentee-ballot request forms and limits the number of ballot drop boxes to one per county except for large counties, which can set up one box for every 100,000 registered voters. Under the new law, the drop boxes must be kept in secure voting locations and emptied and processed by election officials every night. 

All of those provisions “make, and are intended to make, absentee voting incrementally more burdensome and less accessible,” the lawsuit says.