Biden’s DOJ Reveals Plan To Thwart GOP Voter Suppression

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Attorney General Merrick Garland has announced a national plan at the Department of Justice to go after voter suppression. In recent months, following Donald Trump’s defeat in the 2020 presidential election, Republicans around the country have proposed and in a selection of cases successfully implemented new voting restrictions. They’ve cast these restrictions in the guise of election security, but no systematic election integrity problems were ever discovered with the 2020 election cycle, no matter Trump’s claims otherwise.

Now, Garland says that the Department of Justice will double its number of staff members who are working on voting rights issues, explaining as follows:

‘We are scrutinizing new laws that seek to curb voter access, and where we see violations, we will not hesitate to act. We are also scrutinizing current laws and practices in order to determine whether they discriminate against Black voters and other voters of color.’

Some of the new GOP-backed voting restrictions include new voter ID requirements for mail-in voting in Georgia, although no systematic election integrity problems were uncovered with the state’s old system of relying on signatures for ballot verification. Now, what if elderly, low income, or other potentially marginalized voters don’t have ready access to what’s required? Garland said this week that the Department would work “to ensure that we protect every qualified American seeking to participate in our democracy.”

Garland also said that the Department of Justice would be issuing new “guidance” for states covering election-related policy areas, suggesting that federal authorities want to warn state Republican leaders of where they’re potentially violating the law and imposing undue burdens on voters. The guidance will “make clear the voting protections that apply to all jurisdictions as they redraw the legislative maps,” Garland said, adding that other imminent guidelines would cover “early voting and voting by mail.” The Justice Department will also issue guidance “explaining the civil and criminal statutes that apply to post election audits,” according to the Attorney General.

Garland also noted the falsified basis for recent GOP moves, observing that “many of the justifications proffered in support of these post election audits and restrictions on voting have relied on assertions of material vote fraud in the 2020 election that have been refuted by law enforcement and intelligence agencies of both this administration and the previous one, as well as by every court — federal and state — that has considered them.” No matter the consistent repudiations of these false election fraud claims, Trump himself has kept them up.