Current Conditions of Voting Rights Discrimination Georgia A Report Prepared by FAIR FIGHT ACTION for submission by The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights House Committee on the Judiciary OVERSIGHT OF THE VOTING RIGHTS ACT: POTENTIAL LEGISLATIVE REFORMS August 16, 2021 Source: Bettmann/Getty Images Georgia's Enduring Racial Discrimination in Voting and the Urgent Need to Modernize the Voting Rights Act Originally submitted to the United States Senate Judiciary Committee on April 20, 2021 Updated for the United States House Judiciary Committee on August 16, 2021 Acknowledgments is report is dedicated to the voters of Georgia, who continue to persevere in their pursuit of a just democracy and demand for full and equal access to the fundamental right to vote, despite the enduring obstacles placed in their path. Fair Fight Action thanks the contributors to this report: Lawrence & Bundy LLC Jenner & Block LLP Miller & Chevalier Chartered Sandler Reiff Lamb Rosenstein & Birkenstock, P.C Crowell & Moring LLP Schulte Roth & Zabel LLP Fair Fight Action also thanks e Brennan Center for Justice for sage advice and leadership in voting rights. Finally, Fair Fight Action is grateful to the thousands of volunteers who have spent countless hours helping us tell the stories of Georgia’s voters. ese stories could not be told without you and we look forward to continuing this ght together. Table of Contents Executive 1 Summary Historical Background is Important to Understanding the Section I: Need for Continued Protection of Access to the Right to Vote 6 If the Senate Adopts the House Formula, Georgia Will Section II: Again be Subject to Preclearance 23 Georgia’s Recent Elections Demonstrate Section III: that Voting Rights Violations Persist 45 Georgia’s Recent Legislative Session Demonstrates that Attacks Section IV: on Voting Rights Are Increasingly Aggressive and Persistent 118 Congress Has the Robust Record Needed to Section V: Enact Renewed Voting Rights Legislation 143 Table of Authorities 147 Cited in Report EXECUTIVE SUMMARY The United States House of Representatives passed the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, H.R. 4, 116th Cong. (as passed by House, Dec. 6, 2019) (“VRAA”). Fair Fight Action, Inc. (“Fair Fight Action” or “FFA”) addresses the House-passed legislation because, as of this writing, neither the House nor the Senate has introduced the bill in the 117th Congress. Fair Fight Action presents this report because there is an urgent and overwhelming need for Congress to bring the preclearance formula found in the Voting Rights Act (“VRA”) of 1965, 52 U.S.C. §§ 10301–10314, 10501–10508, 10701–10702, into the modern era, to reinstate robust federal oversight over discriminatory voting practices, and to strengthen and protect voting rights—for all eligible voters in Georgia and nationwide. If there ever were a time for Congress to “draft another [preclearance] formula,” that time is now.1 Until his death, Congressman John Lewis continued his unwavering fight to empower voters of color by advocating for passage of the VRAA. Fair Fight Action lifts up Congressman Lewis’s memory and provides this report to support the record underlying renewed voting rights legislation. The report relies on recent events—from the last twenty- five years—for evidence of Georgia’s continued efforts to suppress its own citizens’ right to vote.2 This report is divided into five sections. Section I recounts the history of voter suppression in Georgia and begins with the State of Georgia’s (the “State”) earliest state constitution, ratified in 1777, with its specific exclusion of Black men from voting, and advances through Reconstruction, the Jim Crow era, and the adoption of the VRA in 1965. Then, the report describes the State’s conduct while subject to the VRA’s preclearance requirements, a phase that included DOJ’s objections to 170 discriminatory voting changes between 1968 and 1996 and also included important litigation. The report includes a discussion of the past twenty-five years, the “reach back” time under the VRAA, and describes Georgia’s recent history. That history includes repeated efforts to suppress the vote and intimidate voters of color throughout the State. Whether through the prosecution of the Quitman 10+2 in Brooks County on the Georgia/Florida border, or the challenges to Black voters in Hancock County between Atlanta and Augusta, or moving polling locations to police stations as done both in Macon-Bibb County in central Georgia and in Jonesboro in 1 Shelby County, Ala. v. Holder, 570 U.S. 529, 557 (2013). The Court’s decision in Shelby County is, at least in part, the impetus for the VRAA. 2 Much of the data FFA provides has been collected in FFA’s pending federal lawsuit Fair Fight Action v. Raffensperger, No. 1:18-cv-05391-SCJ, pending in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Georgia. In its 2018 lawsuit, Fair Fight Action and its co-plaintiffs, members of the faith-based community and an organization dedicated to empowering domestic workers, demonstrate how Georgia has implemented policies and procedures that suppress the right of Georgia’s voters and have a disparate impact on voters of color in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment, Fifteenth Amendment, and the Voting Rights Act. Fair Fight Action presents this evidence to support its claims in large part through declarations of Georgia voters. The voters’ individual stories help paint a comprehensive picture of one state’s tireless efforts to suppress its citizens’ right to vote. 1 Clayton County in metropolitan Atlanta, state actors have been unabashed in their efforts to limit access to the polls and restrict the right to vote. The historical evidence continues in Section II, which outlines challenged voting rights violations that have occurred in the State since 1996 to demonstrate that Georgia more than meets the statewide coverage thresholds in the current version of the VRAA. Of course, Fair Fight Action recognizes these thresholds may change as the legislation moves through Congress. In this report, FFA tracks the current version for ease of demonstrating how that version could be applied. The violations discussed include DOJ’s preclearance objections and voting rights litigation outcomes. Among other areas, the DOJ objections barred moving election dates to depress turnout for voters of color; adopting an earlier version of the State’s notorious Exact Match policy; and implementing discriminatory redistricting plans. The report details recent litigation in which courts have determined that either the State of Georgia or its political subdivisions engaged in “voting rights violations” as that term is defined in the House version of the VRAA. While some violations involved challenges to local rules, such as moving to at-large elections that diminished the voting strength of people of color, others involved more systemic practices such as cancelling voter registrations when a would-be voter failed Exact Match. And the report highlights a pair of cases involving the rejection of absentee ballots for a voter’s failure to write in the correct date of birth on an envelope. Two courts—one addressing the issue in Gwinnett County and one addressing the issue statewide—held the rejection of absentee ballots for failing to write in a date of birth or writing an incorrect date of birth likely violated the Civil Rights Act, 52 U.S.C. § 10101(a)(2)(B) and enjoined rejection of ballots solely based on a missing or erroneous date of birth. These cases are of particular interest given that the most recent voting legislation in Georgia, Senate Bill 202, 2021-2022 (“S.B. 202”), reimposes a date-of- birth requirement. The report cements Georgia’s specific status as a jurisdiction meriting coverage as a jurisdiction with multiple violations over a specific period. The report next turns to what has happened during recent elections, incorporating numerous experiences that voters have shared with Fair Fight Action. In Section III, the report addresses the suppressive features of Georgia’s election system in areas where the VRAA promises increased federal oversight: Georgia’s Exact Match policy, polling place changes and closures, and voter purges. The report explains further the traps in Georgia’s Exact Match policy and how it impacts voters—and in particular voters of color—from registration to the polling place and focuses on polling place moves and closures, which have taken place in stunning numbers following Shelby County. These changes have disproportionately affected Black voters, who were twenty percent more likely to miss voting because of nothing other than increased distances to polling locations. The report examines Georgia’s “list maintenance” procedures, under which Georgia’s Secretary of State (“SOS”) has purged—and continues to purge—thousands of voters from the rolls on the demonstrably false assumption the voters have moved away. In the second part of Section III, the report addresses additional features of Georgia elections that demonstrate the need for Congressional intervention. Here, the report highlights the outrageously long lines that have plagued myriad voting locations across the State in recent years. During the 2018 General Election, for example, the lines to vote in Fulton County (Atlanta) were among the 2 longest in the country, and the voters who suffered the longest wait times disproportionately were voters of color. In addition, we describe the problems with inadequate voting supplies, provisional ballots, and voter intimidation perpetrated by the State itself—by sending threatening letters to voters, in exercising the State Election Board’s (“SEB”) investigatory powers, and through advancing false claims of voter fraud. Section IV examines Georgia’s recent legislation, S.B. 202, passed by both legislative bodies and signed into law the same day, March 25, 2021. S.B. 202 ostensibly was adopted to “restore confidence,” but instead imposes further suppressive measures on Georgia’s electorate.