cross-posted from: https://exploding-heads.com/post/47961
A federal judge appointed by former President Barack Obama, U.S. District Judge Steve C. Jones ruled Friday that Georgia's election integrity practices requiring voter ID and citizenship checks were constitutional and in compliance with the Voting Rights Act (VRA), roundly rejecting the arguments of Abrams' Fair Fight Inc. voter advocacy group just weeks before Election Day.
"Although Georgia's election system is not perfect, the challenged practices violate neither the Constitution nor the VRA," Jones ruled in a 288-page decision. "As the Eleventh Circuit notes, federal courts are not 'the arbiter[s] of disputes' which arise in elections; it [is] not the federal court's role to 'oversee the administrative details of a local election.'"
The judge appointed by Obama a decade ago borrowed heavily from the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark ruling last year that upheld Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich and his state's law outlawing ballot harvesting or trafficking. The Brnovich decision, as it is known, was cited several times as Jones concluded the Georgia laws and regulations requiring voters to pass a citizenship check and voter ID did not violate either the Constitution or the Voting Rights Act.
"With respect to citizenship matching, the Court finds that after weighing the Brnovich guideposts, citizenship matching also does not violate Section 2 of the VRA. ... The Court finds that Georgia's system of voting is equally open," Jones wrote.
On the MIDR (missing identification required match legal requirement for voter ID), the judge said he had concluded that the "disparate impact" of photo ID on voters was "de minimis," or legally insignificant, noting that "97.97% of Black voters were not impacted."