Last year, Georgia Secretary of State Karen Handel put together a program whereby election officials would use state driver's license databases and match them against voter databases to determine if any illegal aliens participated in the voting process. The process would apply special scrutiny to any person registering to vote who said that they were not a citizen when they got their driver's license. Seems fair, doesn't it? The Justice Department thought so, and the process did indeed find illegal voters.

Well now Barack Obama's Department of Justice has decided that this program is discriminatory. So let the battle begin. Here's what the DOJ had to say for itself:

We have considered the accuracy of the state's verification process. Our analysis shows that the state's process does not produce accurate and reliable information and that thousands of citizens who are in fact eligible to vote under Georgia law have been flagged....

An error as simple as transposition of one digit of a driver[s] license can lead to an erroneous notation of a non-match.....

....Although the state has not provided data on the racial and language minority characteristics of all registrants whose applications went through the verification process, we have been able to compare the composition of those persons whom the state has flagged for further inquiry because of a non-match with both the composition of newly registered voters in the state and the composition of existing registered voters....

[A]pplicants who are Hispanic, Asian or African-American are more likely than white applicants, to statistically significant degrees, to be flagged for additional scrutiny....

So ... what is the Justice Department's beef here? Well, it seems that they're concerned that when Georgia starts to ferret out illegal voters they find more among Hispanics, Asians or Africans than they do among whites! Who would have thunk it? And since Hispanics (for instance) are more likely to be illegal voters than white folks, the entire process must be discriminatory, and therefore illegal.

Get it?

Naturally, Karen Handel is more that peeved that the DOJ has rejected her program for voter verification. So she decided to respond to the DOJ about its rejection:

The decision by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) to deny preclearance of Georgia's already implemented citizenship verification process shows a shocking disregard for the integrity of our elections.

With this decision, DOJ has now barred Georgia from continuing the citizenship verification program that DOJ lawyers helped to craft. DOJ's decision also nullifies the orders of two federal courts directing Georgia to implement the procedure for the 2008 general election.

The decision comes seven months after Georgia requested an expedited review of the preclearance submission.

DOJ has thrown open the door for activist organizations such as ACORN to register non-citizens to vote in Georgia's elections, and the state has no ability to verify an applicant's citizenship status or whether the individual even exists.... Clearly, politics took priority over common sense and good public policy.