The judge also stopped a rule that inactive voters had to write down their date of birth.
A federal judge in Georgia briefly blocked a part of the state’s voting law that said people couldn’t give food and water to people waiting to vote on election day. The judge also stopped a rule that said absentee voters had to write their date of birth on their ballots.
U.S. District Judge J.P. Boulee still lets the government punish people who give food and water to people waiting in line to vote if they are within 150 feet of the building where the voting is happening. But the judge stopped the ban from being enforced in places less than 25 feet from where people were waiting to vote.
“This conclusion was based on the fact that, unlike the reasonable 150-foot radius of the Buffer Zone, the Supplemental Zone has no edge,” he wrote. “S.B. 202 says that organizations, like Plaintiffs, can’t help people wait in line if they are in the Supplemental Zone, which is within 25 feet of a voter, even if they are outside of the 150-foot Buffer Zone.”
Boulee also stopped a part of the law that said postal votes had to have the voter’s date of birth on the outside package. He wrote that the state “did not show any evidence that absentee ballots rejected for not meeting the Birthdate Requirement were fraudulent ballots.”
But the judge disagreed with the groups’ claim that some limits in the law make it hard for people with disabilities to vote by mail.
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In the spring of 2021, Republican Gov. Brian Kemp signed the Election Integrity Act into law after state leaders passed it. Other parts of the law include asking voters to show ID, making early voting last longer, and ensuring every county has a place to drop off ballots.
The controversial election law that wanted to make voting easier came out soon after the 2020 election. Democrats and big companies like Coca-Cola and Major League Baseball criticized it. The MLB moved the 2021 All-Star Game from Atlanta to Denver in response to the election rule.
Critics of the law, like President Biden and Stacey Abrams, who ran for governor of Georgia twice and lost both times, said it would make it harder for people of color to vote. But in Georgia’s primary and general elections in 2022, record numbers of people voted. This led Republicans to say that the criticism was not fair.
Several groups that fight for human rights and political rights filed a case to get rid of the law.
Both sides said they had won after Boulee’s mixed ruling on Friday.
John Cusick, a junior attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, said in a statement that the decisions “are important wins for our democracy and protecting access to the ballot box in Georgia.”
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said that the state “continues to have one of the most secure and accessible voting systems in the country for all voters, including voters with disabilities.”
In a news release, he said, “I am glad that the court upheld Georgia’s common-sense rules that ban ballot harvesting and make sure that absentee ballot drop boxes are safe.” “Everyone can use Georgia’s voting system, and there are lots of ways for people to use their right to vote.”
On Friday, a federal judge also ruled about the Texas voting rule. The one in Georgia was like this one.
U.S. District Judge Xavier Rodriguez threw out a part of Texas’s law that said people who voted by mail had to give the same ID number they used when they registered to vote. He said the rule was against the U.S. Civil Rights Act because it stopped people from voting on an issue that had nothing to do with whether they were registered.
The U.S. Department of Justice fought against the measure because it increased the number of mail votes refused in the first election after the law was passed in September 2021.
Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke said after the ruling, “This ruling sends a clear message that states may not impose illegal and unnecessary requirements that keep eligible voters from taking part in our democracy.”
In places where the GOP is in charge, several election security bills have been passed since the election in 2020.
