ATLANTA (AP) — From the mountains of Georgia to the Atlantic coast, challenges to voter qualifications have emerged this summer and fall as part of a broad national effort coordinated by Donald Trump’s allies to enlist Republican activists. switch to remove people they consider suspicious from the voting lists.
So far, barely 1% of people questioned have been delisted or placed in challenged status, largely because provinces are ignoring challenges. But those who say Georgia’s voting rolls are full of ineligible voters are trying to change that, filing lawsuits and pushing the Trump-aligned State Election Board to order counties to do more.
According to the Associated Press, more than 63,000 Georgians have been challenged since July 1, when a law that could make it easier to keep up the challenges went into partial effect. The AP survey covered Georgia’s 39 most populous counties, as well as six other counties with challenge activities. That’s a big increase since 2023 and the first half of 2024, when the AP found about 18,000 voters faced the challenge.
And the efforts are spreading geographically. They were concentrated in Democratic counties in metro Atlanta. But since July 1, a hundred or more voters in at least two dozen counties statewide, including some heavily Republican areas, have been tested.
As the AP previously found, county election officials continue to reject the vast majority of challenges. Since July 1, fewer than 800 voters — mostly in the Republican stronghold of Forsyth County in suburban Atlanta — have been removed from the voter rolls or placed in contested status. Voters with disputed status can cast ballots if they prove their residency, but counties should consider removing them next year if they don’t vote.
The effort to purge voters has drawn criticism from the U.S. Department of Justice, which issued a seven-page guidance memo in September that aims to limit challenges and block parts of Georgia’s new law through the National Voter Registration Act from 1993 to quote.
It appears that most of the intended voters have abandoned their addresses on the list, and activists claim that registering them invites fraud. Challengers have been aided by tools that rely on change of address lists and other documents to help identify people who may have been wrongly registered.
“Leaving ineligible voters on the voter rolls increases the likelihood that those individuals will vote in our county, diluting the legitimate votes of our citizens,” said Marci McCarthy, chair of the DeKalb County Republican Party, which governs the board. of the province has taken him to court. elections this month, claiming the country had failed to respond to challenges. “And every vote from an ineligible voter robs us as citizens of our voice.”
A room full of angry voters
When counties send letters to challenged voters, often no one shows up at a hearing to defend their eligibility. But in the Bryan County suburb of Savannah, a room full of angry voters applauded on Oct. 10 when the county board rejected the objections because the person who filed them failed to appear for a hearing.
“I’m frustrated with this whole process, that we all had to be here today,” Michael Smith said during the hearing. “I am frustrated that our state passed a poorly thought out law that required and allowed someone to do this. for all of us.”
Many Democrats and liberal voting rights activists claim that Republicans are challenging voters to unseat Democrats or to sow doubt about the accuracy of the election ahead of the 2024 presidential election. The voter challenge movement stems from longstanding fears about illegal voting, but which came to dominate the Republican Party after Trump’s unsupported claims of voter fraud led many to believe that Joe Biden did not win Georgia in 2020.
“We are amplifying lies and misunderstandings, fundamental misunderstandings, about how election law works,” Rep. Saira Draper of Atlanta, who served as the Democratic Party’s voter protection director in 2020, told the State Elections Board on Oct. 8.
Opponents say disqualification efforts are based on flawed foundations. They say voters who change their mailing addresses have not necessarily changed residence and that some of the information challengers use is outdated. Particularly under fire are voter challenge tools, including EagleAI and True the Vote’s IV3.
“EagleAI is a third-party Internet scraping program that has been rated by county election offices as worse than the programs they already have,” Draper said.
But Mike Coan, executive director of the State Election Board, who has been appointed by the board to investigate whether challenges are being unfairly rejected in eight counties, said he believes challengers are providing “a free public service for our state” by help clean the rollers. Some counties say challenges put together using EagleAI don’t meet the legal standard to remove a voter, but Coan disagrees.
“When you have people who have technology that is much better, you have to listen, not turn your head and look the other way,” Coan said.
He concluded that the denial of many challenges by provinces is “contrary to the spirit and letter of the law.”
“There are thousands and thousands of challenges that have been arbitrarily rejected,” Coan told board members. He and Trump-affiliated board members suggested the board should set statewide rules to ensure more challenges are heard.
Federal and state laws may conflict
Regulations would confront underlying disagreements over whether federal and state laws prevent counties from heeding the vast majority of activists’ challenges. The Justice Department guidance issued last month suggests that some parts of the state law that took effect July 1 will be overridden by federal law.
After the 2020 election, the Republican Party-led state legislature ruled that any voter can file unlimited challenges against other people in their state. That came after Texas-based vote monitoring group True the Vote challenged 364,000 voters in Georgia ahead of two 2021 U.S. Senate elections. Lawmakers passed another law this year that defined probable cause for removing challenged voters and said that counties could remove voters up to 45 days before the election. election.
But federal law says a state can only make systematic changes to its voter rolls up to 90 days before the election. According to Justice Department guidelines, systematic changes include not only government-led efforts but also challenges collected using programs like EagleAI.
Even some deeply Republican counties have postponed action until January, but a few counties have considered action after the 90-day deadline.
Another disagreement concerns challenges for people who have moved.
Through routine maintenance of the voter rolls, which does not require a challenge, officials remove voters who are dead, convicted of crimes, mentally incompetent or no longer living in Georgia.
But under federal law, Georgia can only cancel the registration of a voter who has moved if the voter does not respond to a mailing, goes into so-called inactive status and then does not vote in the next two federal general elections. That process takes more than two years.
Challengers, relying on change-of-address lists, target inactive voters for immediate removal. They claim that the waiting period does not apply to challenges.
Officials in Democratic counties generally disagree, but some Republican-dominated counties see it differently. Forsyth County has removed or placed 635 voters in challenge status since July 1, according to board minutes, representing 80% of challenges in the counties surveyed.
However, Forsyth County remains an outlier. For now, the voter challenges have had little impact in Georgia. But if the courts and the Republican-majority state election board smooth the way, that could change. Challengers show no signs of going away.
