There’s losing a lawsuit, and then there’s what happened to Stacey Abrams in federal court last week.
Abrams, of course, has become a progressive rock star thanks to her insistence that Georgia’s election system is a sink of racially motivated voter suppression. She denied the legitimacy of her 2018 defeat in her first run for governor based on these claims, and she’s been hailed in the press as a savior of American democracy because she is so committed to fighting the state’s supposedly malign practices.
Now, federal district judge Steve Jones, an Obama appointee, has shredded key contentions in her long-running argument against Georgia. In the case, a group founded by Abrams, Fair Fight Action, alleged all manner of violations of the Constitution and the Voting Rights Act. In a comprehensive, careful, and rhetorically unadorned 288-page decision, Jones would have none of it. He ruled against Fair Fight Action and the other plaintiffs on all counts.
The case began in the immediate aftermath of the 2018 election. Elements of the case fell away as Georgia made changes in its election law in 2019, but central claims that Abrams has relied on to maintain that she was cheated — an assertion almost universally accepted by her party — were still at issue. Jones swatted them away based on repeated findings that no actual voters had been harmed and the practices in question were reasonable.
The case centered on several things: the allegedly inadequate training of election workers regarding how to handle the tricky matter of canceling an absentee ballot when someone who has requested such a ballot decides he or she wants to vote in person; the so-called exact-match requirements that information in registration applications line up with other information with the state; and the state’s management of the voter rolls, especially to ensure against felons’ voting and duplicate registrations.
On the absentee-ballot issue, the secretary of state’s office failed to update training manuals in 2020 to reflect changes in this process passed in 2019. The manuals were a nothingburger, though. There were all sorts of other forms of training for officials and poll workers. And since county superintendents receive their training with the manuals upon their initial certification, and many were certified prior to 2020, the outdated guides were irrelevant.
As Judge Jones writes, “there was no connection between the materials and an actual voter issue.” Indeed, of the seven voters the plaintiffs presented who had trouble at polling places, six of them still got to vote. The one who didn’t had a very brief, 15-minute window to vote because that’s the limited time that her senior-care facility allotted to her, and she couldn’t get it sorted out at the polling place in time. Jim Crow, this is not.
This was the pattern through the entire case. Regarding exact match, information on voter-registration applications needs to be the same as information from the Department of Driver Services or Social Security Administration. If there’s a mismatch, voters are deemed “active-missing identification requirement,” or MIDR status. Importantly though, these are still registered voters and can still vote as long as they present acceptable identification.
Judge Jones writes: “The evidence adduced at trail does not establish the magnitude, if any, of the burden caused by the vital matching process,” nor did the plaintiffs provide “direct evidence of a voter who was unable to vote, experienced longer wait times, was confused about voter registration status by being in MIDR status, or experienced heightened scrutiny at the polls.”
Meanwhile, the state’s interest in avoiding one person registering multiple times and establishing that the registrant is an actual person is obviously legitimate. The judge ruled the same way regarding the similar process for establishing that a registered voter is a citizen.
In Georgia, felons who haven’t completed their sentences can’t vote, including if they are on parole or probation. On this matter, Jones found that the burden on voters who were mistakenly identified as felons was indeed quite high and, even though the state has an interest in keeping felons off the rolls, the process isn’t narrow enough. Ultimately, though, it is the counties that handle determining whether a voter is a felon and following through on a cancellation. So the state can’t be held accountable for those acts.
Judge Jones also rejected the idea that racism motivated these rules and practices. It is true that non-white voters are more likely to go into MIDR status or be flagged as non-citizens. The judge found that plaintiffs failed, however, to show exact match and the verification of citizenship “were enacted with a racially discriminatory intent or purpose.” He also noted that the total number of voters affected is extremely small. He quotes the Supreme Court for the proposition that a “policy that appears to work for 98 percent or more of voters to whom it applies — minority and non-minority alike — is unlikely to render a system unequally open.”
As it happens, all of the arguments that Abrams has made against the 2021 Georgia voting law (fulsomely denounced by Joe Biden and boycotted by Major League Baseball) are similar in kind to her claims that have been pulverized in this case — they are just as attenuated and tendentious.
This should all be kept in mind in case Abrams loses a gubernatorial race for a second time and once again tries to depict herself as a brave and undefeated victim of voter suppression.