Georgia doesn’t have to put almost 100,000 voters back on its rolls, a federal judge ruled Friday

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/dec/28/georgia-voting-rights-purge-stacey-abrams

Associated Press
Sat 28 Dec 2019 10.01 EST

Georgia doesn’t have to put almost 100,000 voters back on its rolls, a federal judge ruled Friday.

The US district judge Steve C Jones ruled that a voting rights advocacy group founded by Democrat Stacey Abrams is improperly asking him to interpret state law. Jones also said the group hasn’t proved that people who have been removed had their constitutional rights violated.

However, Jones also ordered Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to do more to warn people that they had been removed. The judge is especially singling out a south-west Georgia state House district where a 28 January special election is scheduled. Voters there who have been removed have only until Monday to re-register.

Raffensperger in October released a list of over 313,000 voters whose registrations were at risk of being canceled. Fair Fight Action, a voting rights group, had asked for the purge to be halted.

Voter purges in Georgia became a hot-button issue during last year’s race for governor between Abrams and Republican Brian Kemp, who won the race. Kemp served as secretary of state before being elected governor and oversaw aggressive voter purges during his tenure. Over 1.4m voter registrations were canceled in Georgia between 2012 and 2018.

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