When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled this week that Ohio’s system of removing inactive voters from the registration rolls didn’t violate federal law, it led Common Cause Georgia and the NAACP to withdraw their lawsuit against Georgia’s similar voter “purge” policy.
The high court’s decision in Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute “essentially disposes, unfavorably, our claim,” lamented veteran liberal attorney Emmet Bondurant of Common Cause Georgia. He withdrew the case in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District in Atlanta, claiming the ruling could leave several hundred thousand Georgians unable to vote in this fall’s elections.
“After the 2016 election, they purged roughly 400,000 who therefore will not be eligible to vote in 2018 unless they have re-registered, which very few people do,” Bondurant said. A spokeswoman for Georgia’s Secretary of State Brian Kemp, whose office oversees voting, could not confirm that claim. But Kemp, also a Republican candidate for governor, hailed the court’s decision.
“This ruling affirms that common-sense measures like Georgia’s voter-list maintenance statutes, which prevent fraud at the ballot box, are appropriate and necessary to ensure secure, accessible, and fair elections,” Kemp said.
Common Cause and the NAACP filed their lawsuit in 2016, claiming Georgia’s policy violated the National Voter Registration Act by unlawfully removing voters simply for failing to vote. Kemp always countered that the lawsuit was without merit. In a letter to Common Cause attorneys, state lawyers representing the secretary of state’s office maintained that “a voter is removed because they have not had any contact with election officials in Georgia for a minimum of seven years, and they have not returned a postage prepaid, pre-addressed return card to confirm their residence.”
According to The Macon Telegraph, that policy helped fuel a rise in the number of inactive Georgia voters from nearly 714,000 in November 2012 to more than 1.3 million in September 2016. Over the same period, the number of Georgia’s registered voters dropped from more than 5.35 million to 5.17 million.
Nearly 552,000 people are currently on Georgia’s inactive voter list, Kemp spokeswoman Candace Broce says.
