ATLANTA — All applications for new voters have been processed, and the total is less than two years ago, according to Secretary of State Brian Kemp.
Despite a push by the Democratic Party of Georgia and a group called the New Georgia Project that submitted 86,000 applications from mostly blacks seeking to register, the total number of registered voters is approximately 39,000 less than two years ago.
Lawyers for the New Georgia Project have complained that Kemp and the local registrars haven’t gotten around to registering about half of those they submitted.
Kemp said county registrars have indeed dealt with every application submitted by the New Georgia Project in time for them to participate in early voting, except for about 6,500 that have obvious errors or the roughly 9,500 that are pending resolution of a discrepancy between the application and existing government databases.
“There are no lost voter-registration applications. Every single one that met the deadline has been processed,” he said Sunday evening in a debate organized by the Atlanta Press Club.
The New Georgia Project estimated that one out of every 10 applications it submitted would be rejected for one reason or another, but state law requires registration drives to hand in every application, even if incomplete. Kemp’s office reported that 513 had died since completing the forms, 1,637 matched felons who can’t vote, 2,124 had no valid year of birth and 2,195 had an invalid or out-of-state zip code. The 9,500 pending could still be registered once the applicant responds to questions local officials have about the form.
New Georgia Project spokesperson Rep. Stacey Abrams, D-Atlanta, said Monday the lawsuit is still headed for a Friday morning hearing in Fulton County’s courthouse. She said they want to know if the numbers Kemp is referring to are from the original 86,000 applications or a group of 40,000 they listed as not being processed at the time the suit was filed two weeks ago.
“Until we are clear about the source of those numbers, we are unsatisfied that all of these voters are on the rolls,” she said.
But Kemp is urging the group to withdraw the suit and even calling on the counties named — including Chatham — to counter sue for attorney’s fees.
“All this talk about 40,000 registrations missing: we have not had one single person come to our office to say, ‘my application has not been processed,'” he said.
Numbers released Monday by a Kemp spokesman showed the total voters registered at 6,038,372, which is 39,182 lower than those registered in 2012. So far this year, 183,000 people have registered since March, but more names have been removed by reasons such as death or moves out of state.
Of those new voters, about 67,500 or one-third are black, one-third white and the rest either unknown, Hispanic or Asian. Earlier in the year, Democratic operatives set a goal of adding 200,000 minority votes on Election Day and estimated that they needed to register at least 500,000 to reach that target.
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