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ATLANTA (CN) — As visitors from across the world descend upon Atlanta for the World Cup, the hype was overshadowed Wednesday as hundreds of voting rights advocates filled the state capitol downtown to protest redistricting.
“This is an attempt to weaken Black voting power,” Isabel Otero, the Georgia policy director for the Southern Poverty Law Center, said.
The mass mobilization of civil rights organizations, labor unions and community advocates did not go unseen by the Republican-led legislature.
Just before the special legislative session was set to begin, Republican House Speaker Jon Burns announced that they will not be drawing new congressional or legislative maps.
“Changes to Georgia’s maps should take place only when members of the General Assembly and citizens have been given ample opportunity to gather the facts, provide input and engage in meaningful discussion,” Burns wrote in a letter to Governor Brian Kemp.
“For this reason, we will not be taking up congressional or legislative redistricting for the 2028 election cycle during this special session,” Burns added.
At a press conference, Senate President Pro Tem Larry Walker III said he and other Georgia Republican Senators agree with Burns on not moving forward with redrawing the maps at this time.
“We believe it would be wise to allow the judicial process to further develop,” Walker said.
Democratic lawmakers applauded the decision, but said they were not ready to give up their fight to ensure Georgia’s Black voters are properly represented.
State Representative Tanya Miller, who is the Democratic candidate for Georgia’s attorney general, compared the redistricting efforts to a long history of voter suppression tactics, such as poll taxes and literacy tests, employed by former confederate states.
“When leaders gerrymander, you are represented by leaders who do not have to listen to you,” Miller said.
“While we are no longer dealing with dogs and hoses, we are dealing instead with the pen that draws the maps. While their tactics might change, we know exactly what they are doing,” Miller added.
The special session comes six weeks after the Supreme Court issued its 6-3 ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, finding that Louisiana’s second majority-Black congressional district should not have been created based on race and was therefore an unconstitutional gerrymander.
The ruling, on top of demands from President Donald Trump, sparked immediate efforts from Republican-led states to redraw maps ahead of the 2026 election to strengthen the GOP’s chances of retaining control of the House.
States including Tennessee, Florida, and Alabama have already done so.
In Georgia, Kemp broke with many other Republican-led states in the South when he announced that the state would not pursue redistricting ahead of the 2026 general election as early voting was already underway.
However, he ordered the special session for the consideration of enacting new electoral maps to take effect for the 2028 election cycle.
Fair Fight Action, a voting rights organization, estimates that roughly 26 legislative seats with large minority populations currently represented by Democrats could be at risk of flipping if their boundaries are redrawn.
Georgia lawmakers revised the state’s political maps in a 2023 special session after a federal judge ordered the maps to be redrawn to include one additional Black-majority congressional district, two additional Black-majority state Senate districts and five additional Black-majority state House districts. That case was appealed and is currently pending in the 11th Circuit Court.
While maps are off the table for now, Georgia’s lawmakers must still tackle another pressing issue they left unresolved when they adjourned in April.
On July 1, a law that prohibits the use of QR codes for vote tabulation in Georgia’s voting system goes into effect, but the legislature never approved measures or money to replace the technology statewide.
Republicans passed the ban two years ago in response to years of pressure from activists who distrust the technology and their votes being counted by bar codes.
Lawmakers began discussions over the issue Wednesday afternoon, but it is unknown how many days they will have to meet before reaching a resolution.
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