Federal judge rejects Biden DOJ's claim that Georgia's voter ID law is racist

A federal court struck down a lawsuit backed by the Biden administration which claimed Georgia's new election integrity laws are discriminatory towards black voters.

Judge J.P. Boulee issued the ruling for the US District Court for the Northern District of Georgia on Wednesday. According to The Federalist, Judge Boulee said that the Biden administration and other Democratic 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]."

In other words, the Democrat Party claims that election integrity laws are racist have been found to hold no merit.

In March 2021, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) signed Senate Bill 202 into law which aims to protect the sanctity of Georgia elections. The bill, also known as the Election Integrity Act, mandates voter ID for absentee voting, bans ballot harvesting, increases security at ballot drop boxes, tightens the timeframe in which absentee voters can request a ballot, and increases regulations around provisional ballots.

The bill also places restrictions on campaign activities and public opinion polling within the vicinity of a polling place. For example, voters can not receive gifts or money within 150 feet of a polling location.

Democrats claimed in their lawsuit against Georgia's Republican lawmakers that the aforementioned laws discriminate against black voters on purpose. The suit argues that the voter ID requirement in the law, which applies to absentee voting, "disproportionately impacts black voters" because a higher proportion of black voters than white voters lack a valid ID, and the majority of registered Georgia voters do not possess a valid driver's license or identification card.

However, Judge Boulee struck down those claims and argued that the plaintiffs "presented no evidence that black registered voters fail to have the other acceptable forms of identification allowed by the statute at a statistically higher rate than white voters."

"These other forms of identification include utility bills, bank statements, paychecks and other government documents that include a name and an address," Boulee wrote. "Ultimately, without this additional evidence, the Court cannot find at this time that the Identification Provision has a disparate impact on black voters."

In addition, Judge Boulee ruled that the plaintiffs did not provide evidence for their claims that black voters wait in voting lines for a longer amount of time than white voters, the outlet reports.

Boulee said the claims "are not statistically significant enough to demonstrate that black voters wait in longer lines at a meaningfully higher rate than white voters."

"Nonetheless, even assuming these percentage point differences were statistically significant, Plaintiffs' expert concedes in his report that too few respondents reported wait times of longer than sixty minutes to make racial comparisons for those wait times reliable," Boulee added.

After the Republican-backed election integrity laws were introduced in the Georgia state legislature, Democrats led a campaign attack claiming that these laws are racist in an attempt to prevent the sanctity of US elections. President Biden called the Bill "Jim Crow on steroids" and Major League Baseball enacted a boycott campaign and relocated the All-Star Game out of Atlanta in protest.

Former President Donald Trump along with dozens of his former team members have been indicted in Fulton County Georgia on claims that they attempted to void the state's 2020 election results by citing a "stolen election."