Last week’s landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling upholding Arizona’s election integrity law is also a big win for Georgia’s new law that is currently being challenged in court by the Biden Justice Department, the Democratic National Committee and left-wing groups. In particular, legal experts say Brnovich v. DNC will have a big impact as Georgia seeks to uphold its laws against so-called ballot harvesting which leads to fraud.
Arizona’s ban on ballot harvesting prevents anyone from coercing voters or altering ballots, and its law requiring voters to vote in the correct precinct allows for the efficient administration of elections. That’s exactly what Georgia’s law is intended to do.
Georgia Republican Party Chairman David Shafer outlined key points regarding how the Arizona decision helps Georgia defend its election laws:
- In the Arizona case, Democrats asked the Supreme Court to transform the plain language of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which forbids election laws that discriminate on the basis of race, into a blank check that would allow for courts to strike down ordinary election laws without limit. The Court’s ruling completely rejected the DNC’s attempts to rewrite Section 2 and categorically overruled the liberal Ninth Circuit’s ruling that the state acted with discriminatory intent in enacting the laws.
- The Court reaffirmed a state’s strong interest in preventing fraud and promoting voter confidence and that courts should focus on whether state law provides equal opportunity to vote, rather than focusing on small disparities in impact.
Finally, some leading GOP activists and legislators maintained earlier this year that the law is not as strong as they would have preferred. Some Republicans at the time worried that if the legislation was too strong it would be overturned by federal courts. Now with the latest Arizona ruling by the Supreme Court, some GOP activists and legislators tell InsiderAdvantage that they would now like to end no-excuse absentee voting as well as abolish automatic voter registration when people get their driver’s license.
