ATLANTA — Democrats reacted angrily to Gov. Brian Kemp’s call Wednesday to rewrite electoral district lines after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in April.
Kemp, a Republican, ordered a special legislative session for July 17 to redraw election maps after the high court ruled last month in Louisiana v. Callais that a new majority-Black legislative district in Louisiana was unconstitutional.
That raised questions about future legal interpretations of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965, which strengthened protections for Black and other minority voters by barring practices that diluted their votes.
Alabama, Louisiana, Tennessee and other Southern states moved to redraw district lines after the ruling.
Democrats in Georgia said Kemp’s decision to join the rush is further evidence that Republicans fear they can no longer win elections.
“When Republicans can’t win elections, they first lie about fraud,” Sen. Harold Jones II, D-Augusta, the Georgia Senate minority leader, said in a statement. “Then they beg Republican judges to save them from democracy’s verdict. Finally, they make new rules to help them win next time.”
He called Republicans “drunk-on-power bullies” who “don’t give a damn what voters want.”
Earlier this week, Kemp also signed House Bill 369, which will require five metro Atlanta counties — Clayton, Cobb, DeKalb, Fulton and Gwinnett — to hold nonpartisan elections for county commissioners, district attorney, and other county offices.
Democrats saw that as a move to undercut the increasing Democratic vote in those counties.
On April 1, Fulton County Commissioner Dana Barrett wrote Kemp asking him to veto the bill. Fulton commissioners hold undeniably partisan offices, she reasoned, since they both fund the county elections board and appoint members to it.
“Because our work absolutely has political implications, it is critical that voters understand the party affiliations of the county commissioners on their ballot,” she wrote.
Barrett noted that Kemp had rejected President Donald Trump’s call in 2020 to help overturn the election results in Georgia that had Trump narrowly losing to Joe Biden: “Governor, you stood up for the will of the people in 2020, I’m asking you to stand up for the will of the people again.”
The Georgia General Assembly’s failure to address a deadline of its own making played into Kemp’s decision. The special session he called is also supposed to address a July 1 deadline to stop using Quick Response (QR) barcodes when tallying votes in Georgia elections.
State Republicans created the deadline when they passed a 2024 law banning the QR codes. In the subsequent two legislative sessions, they did not adopt an alternative.
The death last month of U.S. Rep. David Scott, a metro Atlanta Democrat, triggered a special election in July, leaving little time to address the issue.
The Georgia House Democrats’ caucus issued a press release that accused Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, a GOP candidate for governor, of ensuring a special legislative session by failing to allow a vote on legislation that would have addressed the July 1 deadline.
The House passed a bill that would have moved that deadline back two years. The Senate did not vote on it as the legislative session came to an end in the early morning hours of April 3.
Now, the GOP is using the issue to justify a special legislative session, House Democrats said, adding that the rush before the upcoming elections illustrates why the Voting Rights Act was passed by Congress six decades ago.
“The speed and urgency that Republicans have moved to redraw maps to lock-in single-party rule, indefinitely, shows why the Voting Rights Act was needed in the first place,” the House Democrats wrote.
The QR code issue will not be an easy one to fix. Groups such as the Coalition for Good Governance have sued Georgia in the past over the way the state conducts elections. They contend that the voting machines violate federal and state laws that predate the 2024 law banning QR codes.
The Coalition recently petitioned the State Election Board to mandate the use of hand-marked paper ballots for the November general election. The board rejected the petition.
Local election officials have said that they do not have enough time to switch from the current digital system.
The Legislature will have even less time to address the issue when they meet in July.
“These things should have changed long ago,” said Marilyn Marks, executive director of the Coalition.