Attorney General Merrick Garland on Sunday said his agency is “fighting back.”
Attorney General Merrick Garland on March 3 declared that efforts by states to implement voter ID laws are “unnecessary” and “burdensome,” drawing the ire of Republicans.
While speaking at a church Selma, Alabama, the attorney general was commemorating the 59th anniversary of the targeting of demonstrators by Selma police during an early civil rights protest.
He said that the right to vote “is still under attack,” though he provided little evidence in his speech for how requiring identification would be an assault on voting rights.
“There are many things that are open to debate in America,” Mr. Garland stated. “One thing that must not be open for debate is the right of all eligible citizens to vote and to have their vote counted.”
The attorney general said the Department of Justice is “fighting back” against states that have passed bills requiring identification that would prove such eligibility to cast ballots.
“One of the first things I did when I came into office was to double the size of the voting section of the civil rights division,” Mr. Garland said. “That is why we are challenging efforts by states and jurisdictions to implement discriminatory, burdensome, and unnecessary restrictions on access to the ballot, including those related to mail-in voting, the use of drop boxes, and voter ID requirements.”
“Those measures include practices and procedures that make voting more difficult; redistricting maps that disadvantage minorities; and changes in voting administration that diminish the authority of locally elected or nonpartisan election administrators,” he said. “Such measures threaten the foundation of our system of government.”
The attorney general also accused courts of issuing rulings that, according to him, imperil U.S. voting rights.
“Court decisions in recent years have drastically weakened the protections of the Voting Rights Act that marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge bled for 59 years ago,“ he said. ”And since those decisions, there has been a dramatic increase in legislative measures that make it harder for millions of eligible voters to vote and to elect the representatives of their choice.”
