President Joe Biden on Friday called a sweeping Republican-sponsored overhaul of Georgia’s elections laws “outrageous” and “an atrocity,” and urged Congress to move quickly to bolster voting rights across the nation in response.
Biden commented after Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp signed into law new restrictions on voting by mail and greater legislative control over how elections are run.
“It’s an atrocity,” Biden told reporters. “They passed a law saying you can’t provide water for people standing in line while they’re waiting to vote. You don’t need anything else to know this is nothing but punitive, designed to keep people from voting.”
Kemp lashed back, accusing Biden of attempting to “destroy the sanctity and security of the ballot box.”
In a statement, Biden assailed provisions in the Georgia law to curtail voting hours, restrict absentee ballots in ways that will effectively deny the right to vote to countless people, and make it a crime to provide water to voters while they wait in line to cast their ballots.