Despite an advocacy nonprofit's court action to protect inactive Georgia voters, a federal judge allowed about 309,000 registered voters to be wiped from the rolls Monday, causing the number of registered voters in Georgia to drop from 7.4 million to 7.1 million, according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Fair Fight Action reported that 120,561 of those “voters are being removed solely because they have chosen not to vote in recent elections.” The others on the cancellation list have moved out of state or had warning mailers that went to their houses returned as undeliverable, the paper reported.
Georgia is one of nine states that have laws in place allowing officials to take back the right to vote from its residents in what is known as “use it or lose it” legislation. Laws also allow officials to void registrations for those who don’t vote for several years in Alaska, Pennsylvania, Oregon, Oklahoma, Montana, South Dakota, West Virginia, and Ohio, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.
The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the practice last year in Ohio, which has the most aggressive law in the country regarding the purging of voter rolls. A Reuters study cited more than 2 million Ohio voters kicked off the state’s rolls from 2011 to 2016. The study also found that the rights of voters in black neighborhoods were walked back more than twice as frequently as the rights of voters in white neighborhoods.
Voters only have six years to exercise their right to vote in Ohio before the state clears them from its voter rolls, according to the ACLU. The nonprofit, which challenged the process to the Supreme Court, spelled out the process in Ohio the same day the Supreme Court handed down its decision on June 11, 2018. “Ohioans who don’t vote for two years are sent a nondescript postcard from the Ohio secretary of state’s office requesting a confirmation of their address,” the ACLU wrote. “If those voters don’t respond to the notice or vote within the next two federal election cycles (or four years), they are kicked off the rolls without further notice.”
RELATED: Ohio's planned voter purge targeted tens of thousands of legitimate, active voters
Georgia’s policy works similarly but will, thanks to new legislation, give voters nine inactive years before their registration is voided. Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, formerly secretary of state, was scrutinized nationally when an investigation launched by APM Reports, WABE, and the Center for Investigative Reporting’s Reveal project revealed that he oversaw the purge of about 107,000 people from voter rolls in 2017. In an attempt to make up for his commitment to disenfranchisement, Kemp signed the reform bill changing the number of inactive years before disenfranchisement on April 2 of this year. The bill also mandates that voters get an additional mailer before they are removed from voter rolls.
Fair Fight Action CEO Lauren Groh-Wargo, however, said that Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who advocated for the reform bill, HB 316, is now "attempting to violate" that very law. “Georgians should not lose their right to vote simply because they have not expressed that right in recent elections, and Georgia’s practice of removing voters who have declined to participate in recent elections violates the United States Constitution,” she said.