Metro Atlanta counties have dismissed more than 45,000 voter challenges since July 1

Caleb Groves, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Sep 23, 2024

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ATLANTA — Metro Atlanta counties have rejected more than 45,000 voter eligibility challenges filed by conservative activists since July, according to data collected by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

The number of rejected challenges is stunning — nearly four times the margin of victory in the 2020 presidential race in Georgia. But it won’t increase any more, as boards enter a 45-day quiet period beginning this week and continuing through the election cycle during which no new challenges can be heard.

The AJC collected data from four metro Atlanta counties — Gwinnett, Fulton, Cobb and DeKalb. Despite the deluge of challenges, county boards have agreed to remove fewer than 50 of the challenged voters.

Challengers often tout their efforts as a way to purge voter rolls of outdated registrations, which they say could be used for voter fraud. Concerns over voter fraud have been amplified by former President Donald Trump’s allegations of widespread election fraud, which have been disproved numerous times by recounts, investigations and court proceedings.

Left-leaning voting rights advocates worry these voter challenges could disenfranchise eligible voters and say voter registrations should be canceled through the state’s routine list maintenance process, which takes years to complete. Election officials last year canceled 189,000 inactive voters.

Hani Mirza, attorney for the left-leaning civil rights organization Advancement Project, called the mass voter challenges “incredibly dangerous.”

“They are an effort to remove people from the rolls, and a lot of them use questionable data like EagleAI,” Mirza said.

A Republican-backed startup, EagleAI has billed its software as a tool for local governments to identify and remove potentially ineligible voters. It uses publicly available data to identify voters who may have moved, or registered to vote in another state.

Mirza said mass challenges are burdensome to counties, and led Cobb County to pass the cost of notifying voters to the individuals doing the challenge.

The Gwinnett County elections board last week voted along party lines in a 3-2 split to dismiss another challenge seeking to remove five voters. Gwinnett elections board member Loretta Mirandola, a Democrat, said upholding the challenge would violate a separate federally mandated quiet period for making changes to the county’s voter rolls.

Federal law mandates voter rolls be cleaned no later than 90 days before a federal election. But Senate Bill 189, Georgia’s latest change in election law which went into effect July 1, allows activists to begin the removal process even closer to Election Day. The new law upholds challenges if the challenger can prove a voter moved, registered in a new jurisdiction, registered at a nonresidential address or died.

The law builds on a 2021 state statute allowing any registered voter to contest the eligibility of an unlimited number of voters in that same county. Conservative activists have utilized these Republican-backed election laws to lodge more mass voter challenges ahead of this year’s presidential election.

The 45,000 challenges submitted since July added to the over 350,000 challenges filed since 2020. Almost all of the challenges are dismissed by county election officials.

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