Georgia: 102,000 at risk of exit from voter rolls

ATLANTA -- Georgia's secretary of state is making public a list of nearly 102,000 voters who will be removed from the rolls unless they act to preserve their registrations.

Republican Brad Raffensperger announced the list Friday, part of an every-other-year effort to remove voters who may have died or moved away. Officials say the removals include about 67,000 voters who submitted a change-of address form to the U.S. Postal Service and about 34,000 voters who had election mail returned.

Georgia has about 7.8 million voters.

Election officials will mail cancellation notices. People who respond within 40 days will have their registration switched back to active. Anyone who is removed could register again.

On a monthly basis, the secretary of state has been removing voters who were convicted of felonies or who died.

Raffensperger said more than 18,000 voters were removed last month after Georgia concluded they have died based on information from Georgia's death registry or the Electronic Registration Information Center, a partnership among 30 states and the District of Columbia.

Voter purges in Georgia became a hot-button issue during the 2018 governor's race between Democrat Stacey Abrams and Republican Brian Kemp.

Kemp oversaw aggressive voter purges during his tenure a secretary of state before being elected governor. More than 1.4 million voter registrations were canceled in Georgia between 2012 and 2018.

The removals are much smaller than the more than 300,000 voters that Raffensperger sought to remove in 2019. That year, Fair Fight Action, a voting rights group founded by Abrams, sued to stop a portion of the removals.

During the lawsuit, Raffensperger agreed to keep 22,000 voters on the rolls after finding it was moving too soon to cancel their registrations. But a federal judge ruled against Fair Fight Action's argument that Georgia should have to keep another 98,000 voters registered.

In 2019, Georgia purged 287,000 voters, while nearly 5,000 either voted or got in touch to keep their registration from being canceled.

Georgia law says voters should be moved to inactive status if they have no contact with the state for a period of time. The General Assembly voted in 2019 to lengthen the no-contact period to five years. Inactive registrations are later removed if voters miss the next two general elections, giving them a total of nine years.

Only 276 voters will be removed under those "use it or lose it" provisions this year.

"Making sure Georgia's voter rolls are up to date is key to ensuring the integrity of our elections," Raffensperger said in a Friday statement. "That is why I fought and beat Stacey Abrams in court in 2019 to remove nearly 300,000 obsolete voter files before the November election, and will do so again this year."

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