FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
August 6, 2021
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Attorney General Steve Marshall Files Brief in Support of Georgia’s Election-Integrity Reforms Targeted by Biden Administration
(MONTGOMERY) – Attorney General Steve Marshall joined 15 other states in filing a brief opposing a Biden administration lawsuit aimed at overturning Georgia’s new voting law enacted in March.
“After failing to pass a federal takeover of state voting laws in Congress, the Biden administration is now engaged in a full-court-press strategy to undermine state election-integrity reforms in the courts,” said Attorney General Marshall.
“In a brazenly political move, the U.S. Department of Justice sued the State of Georgia, seeking to take control of Georgia’s elections by relying on baseless charges of racism against the state legislature. The federal lawsuit offers no legitimate grounds for overturning the new Georgia voting law, which not only provides voters broad access to the polls and protects ballot integrity, but includes commonsense safeguards that have already been adopted by numerous other states.
“Georgia’s new law provides fairness and accommodation to all voters and there are no credible grounds to subject it to legal challenge. There is no merit to the Biden administration’s lawsuit, which belies its true motive of aiming to achieve through the courts what it could not achieve in Congress: federal control over the state election process.”
The attorneys general amicus brief, filed Tuesday with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, supports Georgia’s motion to dismiss the case. Georgia’s law provides ready access to voting opportunities by adding early in-person voting days and by guaranteeing the availability of drop boxes for absentee ballots.
The Department of Justice argues that the parts of Georgia’s law designed to prevent voter fraud must be motivated by racial discrimination because, the Department insists, there is insufficient evidence of voter fraud to justify the new law. But, as the attorneys general explain in their brief:
“The Supreme Court recently recognized [that] states need not wait for fraud to infect an election before taking steps to prevent it. . . . Georgia’s law is a reasonable updating of the rules of the road in a greatly expanded voting environment, and successfully balances the tensions between two virtues: free and fair elections. The Court should dismiss the Department’s complaint.”
Attorney General Marshall joined his colleagues from Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas,
Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Montana, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina,
Tennessee, Texas, Utah and West Virginia in filing the amicus brief.
Read a copy of the attorneys general amicus brief here.
[To access link, click PDF icon at upper right of press release]
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