I posted some very good news here a few weeks ago:
Voter registration shut down March 20 ahead of the deciding runoff June 20 for the 6th District election, which is being held in the northern suburbs of metro Atlanta.
Batten, however, ordered registration immediately reopened until May 21.
And Mother Jones emphasizes that this is a big boost for Jon Ossoff’s (D. GA-06) campaign:
"It was a game-changer," says Tharon Johnson, a Democratic strategist based in Atlanta. "The extension of the deadline presents a tremendous opportunity for the Ossoff campaign to expand the electorate and bring a lot of new registered voters to the polls."
One of the groups that quickly ramped up their efforts in the district was the New Georgia Project, which was launched by state House Minority Leader Stacey Abrams in 2013 to enroll minorities under the Affordable Care Act. It soon became apparent that many people of color in Georgia were not registered to vote. "We dug into the numbers," says Nse Ufot, the executive director of the New Georgia Project, and it turned out there were more than 800,000 eligible but unregistered people of color in Georgia. Since 2014, she says, the group has registered nearly 210,000 minority voters in the state.
By overlaying voter registration information from the secretary of state's office with the latest census data, the group concluded that there are nearly 27,000 unregistered African Americans in the 6th Congressional District. Voter registration rates in the 6th District—a historically white, wealthy, and educated suburb—are the highest in the state. But like the rest of Georgia, it's becoming more ethnically and economically diverse. To reach these new residents, Ufot says, staff and volunteers are knocking on 1,200 to 1,400 doors a day and setting up voter registration booths at malls and grocery stores on the weekends. Several other groups are actively registering voters, as is the Ossoff campaign itself, which says it is registering about 100 people per day.
As organizers and the campaign are aware, registering new voters is the easy part. Making sure they get to the polls is harder. "It's a combination of knocking on doors and helping people get voter IDs, and identifying people who need help getting rides to the polls," says Ufot.
Ufot fears there could be one additional wrinkle: whether the three counties that make up the 6th District will be able to process all the new voter registrations. Ufot says her group is keeping an eye on the counties to ensure that those new voters are added to the rolls in time to vote. After the court's decision, the counties had a backlog of tens of thousands of registrations to process, in addition to new applications coming in. Cobb County is reportedly receiving about 600 new registratrions a day.
In the legal battle over the registration deadline, Republican Secretary of State Brian Kemp argued that the extension would force election officials to scramble to process the backlog of registrations and new applications. "Cobb County will be required to hire temporary workers to quickly process a significant backlog of voter registration applications," he warned in a legal brief. Ufot worries that efforts to bring new voters to the polls could be thwarted if the counties fail to process new registrations, not just in this election but in future ones. "For the populations that we focus on who are so difficult to reach and to motivate," she says, "[if] they show up and they are embarrassed by a poll worker who tells them in front of all their neighbors that they are not on the rolls, it's going to be so hard to get them back."
With all this in mind, the DNC is doubling down ground game efforts to reach out to newer voters:
The Democratic National Committee will hire 10 new organizers to boost Democrat Jon Ossoff’s 6th District campaign and assign them to target tens of thousands of left-leaning residents who didn’t vote in last month’s special election.
Democrats are looking for every edge they can get in the June 20 runoff between Ossoff and Republican Karen Handel to represent the district, which spans from east Cobb to north DeKalb. The seat has long been held by Republicans, but Donald Trump’s struggles in the territory and Ossoff’s emergence have made it surprisingly competitive.
There are a trove of voters to target. The DNC said about 48,000 black voters and 18,000 Asian voters were registered in the district and didn’t cast ballots. Another 12,000 or so Latino voters also didn’t vote in the contest.
DNC Chair Tom Perez said in a statement the party is relying on an emerging coalition of black, Latino and Asian voters who “have been at the heart of the resistance and will be at the heart” of Ossoff’s campaign.
If you live in Georgia’s 6th District and you want to make Karen Handel’s blood boil, click here to register to vote by May 21st. And click here to donate and get involved with Ossoff’s campaign.