March 31, 2025 Story by: Publisher
This article has been updated to include a statement from U.S. Attorney General Pamela Bondi.
U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi on Monday instructed the Justice Department to dismiss a lawsuit challenging a sweeping election overhaul that Georgia Republican lawmakers passed in the wake of President Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss in the state.
The lawsuit, filed in June 2021 under former President Joe Biden, alleged that the Georgia law was intended to deny Black voters equal access to the ballot. Bondi said the Biden administration was pushing “false claims of suppression.”
“Contrary to the Biden Administration’s false claims of suppression, Black voter turnout actually increased under SB 202,” Attorney General Pamela Bondi said in a press release. “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,” she concluded.
The law was part of a trend of Republican-backed measures that tightened rules around voting, passed in the months after Trump lost his reelection bid to Biden. Known as SB 202, the law added a voter ID requirement for mail ballots, shortened the time period for requesting a mailed ballot and resulted in fewer ballot drop boxes available in populous metro Atlanta counties.
Last month, Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger wrote to U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi with a public request for the DOJ to drop its lawsuit against a 2021 overhaul of Georgia’s election laws, which Justice Department attorneys have argued was passed to restrict Black voters’ ballot access in violation of Section 2. Raffensperger’s office has not yet received a response, according to spokesperson Mike Hassinger.
Three days after the start of the second Trump administration, Noah Bokat-Lindell, a career DOJ attorney, appeared before a panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for a separate case over Georgia’s congressional and state legislative redistricting plans.
During oral arguments, Bokat-Lindell defended the constitutionality of Section 2 — a position that GOP officials in states including Georgia and Louisiana have been opposing in multiple lawsuits — as well as the right of private individuals and groups to sue to enforce the law’s protections against racial discrimination in elections.
For decades, private challengers, who do not represent the U.S. government, have brought most of the lawsuits for enforcing Section 2.
After Justice Neil Gorsuch released a one-paragraph opinion on the topic in 2021, Republican state officials have pushed a novel legal argument — that the Voting Rights Act does not allow private individuals and groups to bring Section 2 lawsuits. Voting rights advocates fear it’s a potential path for undermining Section 2, which they say is crucial after a 2013 Supreme Court ruling effectively dismantled requirements for certain states and counties with a history of racial discrimination to get “preclearance” approval from the Justice Department or a federal court before changing their election rules.
Source:AP News
