Nine months after President Trump was forced to dissolve a panel charged with investigating voter fraud, GOP officials across the country are cracking down on what they describe as threats to voting integrity — moves that critics see as attempts to keep some Americans from casting ballots in November’s elections. In Georgia, election officials have suspended more than 50,000 applications to register to vote, most of them for black voters, under a rigorous Republican-backed law that requires personal information to exactly match driver’s license or Social Security records. In Texas, the state attorney general has prosecuted nearly three dozen individuals on charges of voter fraud this year, more than the previous five years combined. And in North Carolina, a U.S. attorney and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) issued subpoenas last month demanding that virtually all voting records in 44 counties be turned over to immigration authorities within weeks — a move that was delayed after objections from state election officials.
Voting rights advocates said Republicans are seizing on sporadic voting problems in an effort to disenfranchise voters of color.
In Georgia, several of these groups filed a lawsuit Thursday seeking to block the “exact match” registration law passed last year.
“The myth of voter fraud is used by those who wish to curtail the right to vote of specific populations, usually minority voters,” said Ezra Rosenberg, an attorney for the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a participant in the suit. “Instead of thinking up schemes to stop people from voting, we should be doing everything in our power to make it easier for people to vote,” he added.
Full Article: GOP claims of voter fraud threat fuel worries about ballot access in November – The Washington Post.