Georgia House Minority Leader Stacey Abrams and founder of the
civic advocacy organization, New Georgia Project.
In a Tuesday decision called "outrageous" by one leading voter advocate, Superior Court Judge Christopher Brasher of Fulton County
denied a petition demanding that the Georgia secretary of state process 40,000 voter registrations missing from a public database. Alice Ollstein reports:
Though early voting is well underway in the state, Judge Brasher called the lawsuit “premature,” and said it was based on “merely set out suspicions and fears that the [state officials] will fail to carry out their mandatory duties.”
Angela Aldridge, an organizer with the group 9 to 5 Atlanta Working Women who has been working to register voters for several months, told ThinkProgress she was “furious” when she learned of the outcome: “That impedes people’s rights,” she said. “People need information before they go out to vote and they don’t even know if they’re registered or not. They were discouraged, upset, kind of frazzled, not really knowing what was going on. What can you even say to people who want to vote but possibly can’t? They might get disengaged and say, ‘Why vote? It doesn’t matter.’ It’s really disheartening.”
The lawsuit was filed by the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the law firm Robins, Kaplan, Miller & Ciresi L.L.P., the law firm Sandler, Reiff, Lamb, Rosenstein & Birkenstock, P.C., attorney Jerry Wilson and attorneys for the NAACP, after the secretary of state’s office denied requests for a face-to-face meeting to discuss the missing applications.
Those missing registrations represent 1.5 percent of the Georgians who voted in 2010. So, if it turns out the missing registrations don't get processed and some losing candidates come forward after the election to say they might have won had the registrations been processed, what can be done to fix things? Nothing. Because there are no election do-overs. This might not only affect some obscure down-ballot candidates. After all, Democrat Michelle Nunn and Republican David Perdue are in a tight race for the Senate seat of retiring Sen. Saxby Chambliss.
The group leading the voter registration effort—the New Georgia Project—has estimated that 800,000 Georgians—"people of color, voters between the ages of 18 and 29, and unmarried women—what the group calls the 'Rising American Electorate'" weren't registered to vote this past January. Since then the group—founded by the Democratic leader of the Republican-dominated Georgia House, Rep. Stacey Abrams—says it and 12 partner groups registered around 116,000 new voters. But in court last Friday, the group said 40,000 of those registrations had not been processed in five counties—all of them encompassing Democratic strongholds in Atlanta, Columbus and Savannah. Republican Secretary of State Brian Kemp said the claim was wrong.
A cynic might think that this is yet one more voter suppression technique in a state with a long history of such suppression. And it appears the suppressors may get away with it.
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