President Joe Biden slammed the major voting law Georgia lawmakers passed Thursday, which will severely restrict voting access in the state.
“This is Jim Crow in the 21st century,” he said in a statement, acknowledging how parts of the law disproportionately impact Black voters. “It must end. We have a moral and constitutional obligation to act.”
“This law, like so many others being pursued by Republicans in statehouses across the country, is a blatant attack on the Constitution and good conscience,” Biden said.
Among several other provisions, the law creates stricter voter identification requirements for absentee balloting, limits drop boxes, ends voting hours earlier and makes it a crime to offer food or water to voters waiting in lines.
Those are lines, Biden argued, that “Republican officials themselves have created by reducing the number of polling sites across the state, disproportionately in Black neighborhoods.”
The new law comes as Republicans continue to push unfounded claims of voter fraud. Georgia went blue in the 2020 presidential race and elected two Democratic senators.
“After the November election last year ... significant reforms to our state elections were needed,” Gov. Brian Kemp (R) claimed while signing the bill.
Biden dismissed those claims Friday.
“Recount after recount and court case after court case upheld the integrity and outcome of a clearly free, fair and secure democratic process,” he said.
Multiple civil rights groups have sued Georgia over the law, saying it violates the Voting Rights Act of 1965 along with the First and 14th Amendments.