Georgia wrongfully removed nearly 200,000 residents from voter rolls, new report says
Voter roll purge errors led to nearly 200,000 canceled registrations in Georgia, according to a new report.
Findings released by the American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia suggest the state wrongfully removed thousand names from the voter rolls in December 2019 after determining those residents had moved from the address listed on their registrations. None of those residents had actually moved, however.
“We found 198,351 Georgia voters who supposedly moved from their registration addresses who, in fact, have not moved at all, and therefore were wrongly purged — a 63.3.% error rate,” per the report conducted by a nonpartisan nonprofit, the Palast Investigative Fund.
For the report, Palast employed five address verification firms to conduct what’s called an “Advanced Address List Hygiene” on the 313,243 names that were scrubbed from the state’s voter rolls last year, according to the ACLU of Georgia. A summary of the findings shows that of the canceled “mover” registrations, 247,832 were not verified as having actually relocated. After calculating the number of voters who had died, had addresses that the Postal Service considered not “mailable,” among other factors, the report came to the lower figure of 198,351 voters who still lived at their registered address and were therefore wrongfully removed.
“I was stunned, “investigative journalist Greg Palast, who conducted the investigation, told McClatchy News of the findings. “It’s heartbreaking. Georgia is the birthplace of the American Civil Rights Movement, so it’s really tragic.”
Palast said he had a chance to meet with several Georgia voters who had their names removed from the rolls, including the 92-year-old cousin of Martin Luther King, Jr. The state claimed she had moved from her home in Atlanta.
The Peach State has three ways of verifying a voter’s address: returned mail, a form submitted to the National Change of Address registry or failure to vote in two federal election cycles “combined with failure to return a ‘confirmation’ postcard” used to confirm a person’s address, the report explained.
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“One likely source of state error: 3 of 4 voters cancelled who were marked ‘NCOA’ by the Secretary are, in fact, not on the NCOA (National Change-of-Address) list,” according to the findings.
The report went on to explain the way the state of Georgia verifies addresses — a database check — is the cheaper, but less accurate option.
“The fee for the postal and proprietary databases runs about 5 cents per address — versus a postcard, printed, mailed, postage-paid return plus processing for half a million cards that can run into the millions of dollars — to obtain substantially inaccurate results.”
The report found that those most affected by the registration cancellations were “younger citizens and citizens of color.”
The findings come just weeks after it was announced that thousands of Georgia voters were on track to be marked as “inactive,” putting them one step closer to having their registrations ended completely. Voters whose absentee ballot applications were deemed “undeliverable” were first alerted by county elections officials in July, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.
“Voters who respond to those letters within 30 days will retain their active status,” the newspaper reported. “But many voters won’t receive the letters because they were mailed to the same addresses where they were undeliverable in the spring.”
At the time, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said he didn’t know how many residents were at risk of having their voting status changed.
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The Palast Investigative Fund has since launched a website allowing Georgia voters to check if their names are on the purge list, allowing them time to re-register ahead of the general and special elections on Nov. 3.
“Very few people have any idea that they’ve lost their right to vote,” Palast told McClatchy News. “So they’ll be shocked when they go to vote and they’re told ‘you cant’ vote here anymore.’ That will have a huge effect on the election ... because Georgia is such a down to the wire state.”
McClatchy News contacted the Secretary of State’s office for comment and is awaiting response.
