“Americans can be confident that this Department of Justice will protect their vote and never play politics with election integrity,” Bondi said in a statement Monday.

Georgia’s Election Integrity Act, also known as Senate Bill 202, was the first election overhaul bill of any state to pass in the aftermath of the 2020 election, during which states had passed emergency measures to make voting laws more lenient in the name of COVID-19. Trump attributed his loss in that election to the changed policies and to unfounded claims that widespread fraud occurred. The president has since perpetuated unverified claims about fraud and called for more restrictive election laws.

Georgia’s bill, for its part, sparked outrage from Democrats, including former President Joe Biden and voting rights activist Stacey Abrams, who alleged it would bring back Jim Crow by suppressing votes of black Georgians.

The bill added new voter identification requirements, put restrictions on ballot drop boxes and absentee ballots, and expanded the window for early voting, among other changes. Then-Attorney General Merrick Garland alleged when announcing a lawsuit against the bill in 2021 that it violated the Voting Rights Act.

“Our complaint alleges that recent changes to Georgia’s election laws were enacted with the purpose of denying or abridging the right of black Georgians to vote on account of their race or color,” Garland said at the time.

The Trump DOJ’s reversal in the case came as welcome news to those on the Right. The Republican National Committee, which intervened early on in the case, applauded the move and criticized Democrats for their rhetoric about the bill.

“This is a victory for election integrity and a defeat for every Democrat who lied about Georgia’s election law,” RNC Chairman Michael Whatley said in a statement

Georgia saw record-high voter turnout in 2022 and 2024. The Brennan Center for Justice found last December that white voter turnout rates increased whereas black voter turnout rates did not in the last election. But the left-leaning group did not provide evidence that that finding could be attributed to Georgia’s bill.

Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, told the Washington Examiner the claims that Georgia’s bill was discriminatory were “utter BS” and that turnout levels proved that.

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger celebrated Bondi’s announcement in a statement and lamented that Democrats’ claims about the bill resulted in the MLB moving its All-Star game, a lucrative event for the state, out of Georgia in protest of the bill.

“This reaffirms that the Election Integrity Act stands on solid legal ground,” Raffensperger said, adding that his “commitment has always been to ensure fair and secure elections for every Georgian.”

In January, the DOJ voluntarily dismissed election cases brought in Virginia and Alabama. The Biden DOJ had alleged that election officials’ efforts in those states to remove noncitizens from their voter rolls were a violation of a National Voter Registration Act provision that restricts a state from systematically removing people from its voter registration list in the 90 days before an election.

The lawsuits came as red-leaning states went to great lengths to announce that they were rooting out voting by noncitizens ahead of the 2024 election. Voting rights activists said such efforts were overdone, pointing to the lack of evidence of widespread voting by noncitizens.

The DOJ, under Bondi, also dropped a lawsuit this month that the Biden administration brought in Texas in 2021 alleging that the state’s congressional map violated the Voting Rights Act.

Von Spakovsky said that, looking ahead, the Trump DOJ’s top priority should be to target blue states’ voter registration lists, which he alleged were not cleaned regularly. States are required to have processes in place to purge their voter registration lists of people who have died, moved, or otherwise become ineligible to vote.

“Now what the Civil Rights Division needs to do is start actually enforcing the parts of the laws that the Biden administration refused to enforce, and the most important one is — both the National Voter Registration Act and the Help America Vote Act have provisions that require states to engage in regular maintenance of their voter registration lists,” von Spakovsky said, alleging that blue states “haven’t complied with those laws in years.”

The reversals of the Biden-era lawsuits mark the beginnings of a broader effort by Trump administration officials to attempt to tighten their grip on federal elections.

MISSISSIPPI VOTING LAWSUIT COULD REIN IN COUNTING OF LATE-ARRIVING BALLOTS

The president’s recent executive order highlighted mail-in voting, in particular, and directed Bondi to target states accepting ballots postmarked by Election Day but received after it. The DOJ will be well positioned to wage legal fights on these grounds after the conservative 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled ahead of the 2024 election that Mississippi could not accept postmarked ballots.

Trump also called for an additional proof of citizenship requirement on federal voter registration forms, which voting rights advocates have already sued over, arguing that it is a superfluous burden and that Trump does not have the authority to impose it.