The U.S. Justice Department told Georgia election officials this week that their program for verifying the citizenship of voters has been rejected because it violates the Voting Rights Act. You would think that our state’s officials would have gotten the message by now — this is at least the third time in nine months that the DOJ has turned down this plan because it discriminates against non-white voters.
For good measure, the Justice Department also said that a new state law requiring persons to show proof of citizenship before they can register to vote is “unenforceable” because Georgia has not obtained federal clearance for that particular change in its election laws.
This issue goes back a couple of years and involves efforts by Republican officials to make it more difficult for blacks, Latinos and other non-caucasian voters to cast ballots. When Karen Handel was secretary of state, she devised a program of cross-matching data from the voter registration rolls with the Department of Driver Services database. This program supposedly would flag non-citizens who should not be voting.
Voter rights groups went to court and protested this attempt at voter suppression. A panel of federal judges ruled in October 2008, as early voting was proceeding in the presidential election, that the state would have to allow all of these voters Handel’s office had been flagging to cast “challenged ballots.”
After Barack Obama took office, the Justice Department rejected Handel’s voter-flagging program and charged that it had prevented numerous African American, Latino and Asian persons from voting who should have been allowed to cast ballots.
“Our analysis shows that the state’s process does not produce accurate and reliable information and that thousands of citizens who are in fact eligible to vote under Georgia law have been flagged,” said Loretta King, assistant attorney general in the civil rights division, in a May 29, 2009 letter to state Attorney General Thurbert Baker.
Handel has a history of being stubborn when judges and lawyers try to tell her she’s done something illegal, so she ordered the state law department to appeal that denial of the verification program. Her appeal was turned down by the Justice Department in October. An assistant attorney general in the state law department asked the Justice Department in December to reconsider that decision once more.
The Justice Department sent a letter to the law department this week informing them that the state’s voter flagging program has again been rejected — making it the third time that federal officials have tried to convey this message to Georgia.
“I remain unable to conclude that the State of Georgia has carried its burden of showing that the original voter registration verification program has neither a discriminatory purpose nor a discriminatory effect,” Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez said in the letter to the law department.
Perez said that SB 86, the law passed by Republican legislators last year that requires proof of citizenship for people registering to vote, has not been submitted to the federal court in the District of Columbia or to the Justice Department for administrative review as required by the Voting Rights Act.
“Changes that affect voting are legally unenforceable unless and until the appropriate Section 5 [Voting Rights Act] determination has been obtained,” Perez reminded the law department.
Handel is long gone as secretary of state, but her successor appears to be determined to keep fighting this battle. Brian Kemp said he will ask Attorney General Baker to file a petition for a declaratory judgment in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia in an attempt to salvage the citizenship requirement.
“The State of Georgia will no longer watch the Obama Justice Department play politics with our election processes and protections,” Kemp said in a statement released by his office. “The Justice Department is denying Georgia’s legal requirement to verify the information provided by new voter registration applicants.”
What we have here is really a very simple situation. You can get away with programs that deny some citizens the right to vote when a guy like George W. Bush is president. When you have a president like Barack Obama, however, the Justice Department is going to take a dim view of attempts to keep non-caucasian citizens from casting their ballots.
Attorney General Eric Holder needs to have a conference call with Kemp and Handel and ask them this: “What part of ‘no’ do you have trouble understanding?”
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