Supporters of former President Donald Trump expressed anger at Merrick Garland Sunday after the U.S. attorney general decried efforts to restrict voting access during an address in Selma, Alabama.
Garland, alongside Vice President Kamala Harris, visited the historic city to mark the 59th anniversary of the 1965 event known as “Bloody Sunday,” in which Selma police officers attacked demonstrators marching across the Edmund Pettus Bridge as part of a broader African American civil rights movement. Speaking at the Tabernacle Baptist Church, Garland touched on the ways in which “the right to vote is still under attack.”
“That is why the Justice Department is fighting back,” Garland said. “That is why 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. 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.”
The methods of expanding voting access listed by Garland have often come under scrutiny from Republican-led governments. Their subsequent efforts to curtail them have been criticized as efforts to minimize the ability of predominantly marginalized communities to vote.
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They have also more recently come under fire from former President Donald Trump, who made false claims that such methods were used by his opponents to conduct widespread voter fraud, which he falsely blames for his loss to President Joe Biden in the 2020 election. These ideas, though widely debunked by Democrats and independent experts, have been adopted by followers of his “Make American Great Again” (MAGA) movement, who responded to Garland’s comments from Sunday with vitriol.
“Merrick Garland makes it clear the Biden regime intends to cheat in the 2024 election,” former Fox News producer Kyle Becker wrote in a post to X, formerly Twitter. “The Biden AG said election integrity measures like voter IDs & drop box bans are ‘discriminatory, burdensome & unnecessary.’ This is how cheaters talk. The fix is in.”
“Attorney General Merrick Garland LIES (again), claiming that election integrity efforts — such as voter ID requirements and restrictions on ballot ‘drop boxes’ — are “‘discriminatory, burdensome, and unnecessary,'” an X user going by “Proud Elephant” wrote. “Do these people EVER tell the truth?”
“AG Merrick Garland tells a group of black people at a Selma church service that he is working hard to halt voter ID laws because they are ‘discriminatory, burdensome, and unnecessary,'” Collin Rugg, co-owner of the Trending Politics news website, wrote. “Assuming that black people can’t get an ID is extremely racist.”
Counter to Rugg’s assertion, voter ID laws have been criticized for decades as broadly discriminatory, with opponents, like the League of Women Voters (LWV), arguing that they “disproportionately impact Black, Native, elderly, and student voters.” Generally, such laws are seen as having outsized impacts on communities where people are less likely to have forms of photo identification, while also not having a material impact on lessening fraud.
Newsweek reached out to the Department of Justice (DOJ) via email on Sunday evening for comment. Any responses received will be added to this story in a later update.
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.