Georgia: House to vote on bill that groups say hurts minority voters | Atlanta Journal-Constitution

An elections bill up for consideration in the state House Wednesday has raised the ire of voter advocacy groups, who say it could disproportionately hurt minority Georgians trying to join the state’s voter rolls. House Bill 268, which is scheduled to be considered by the state House, would create a 26-month deadline for voting applicants to correct discrepancies in what they submit to the state when they register. It is being opposed by the same groups who sued Secretary of State Brian Kemp last year, alleging the system disenfranchised minority voters because the requirement blocked tens of thousands of them from voter rolls. That suit was settled two weeks ago.

Georgia: State settles lawsuit alleging it blocked minority voters | Atlanta Journal Constitution

Georgia has settled a federal lawsuit that accused Secretary of State Brian Kemp of disenfranchising minority voters because of a requirement on registration forms that critics said blocked thousands of them from voter rolls. The state will no longer reject applications that don’t exactly match identification information in state and federal databases as part of the agreement, which was finalized late Thursday. “Based on the advice of the Attorney General’s office and in order to avoid the expense of further litigation, we agreed to settle this lawsuit,” said Candice Broce, Kemp’s spokeswoman. “The verification system Georgia had in place is important to accurately maintain our voter rolls and prevent illegal votes from being cast in our state’s elections.” The state had previously agreed to suspend the requirement.

Georgia: Bill would allow ‘scarlet letter’ marking of non-citizen driver’s licenses | The Guardian

Georgia lawmakers are advancing a bill that would allow the state to add “non-citizen” to the driver’s licenses of legal residents and green card holders living in the state. While some states have similar demarcation on the licenses of undocumented immigrants, activists say the breadth of Georgia’s proposal is unprecedented. “[This] is the first time that I’ve heard of any state considering … passing this kind of divisive action,” said Naomi Tsu, referencing the bill’s focus on immigrants living here entirely lawfully. Tsu is the deputy legal director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s (SPLC) Immigrant Justice Project. “We’re pretty concerned about this idea of branding some residents with a ‘scarlet letter’.” Representative Alan Powell, who sponsored the provision, cited preventing non-citizens from registering to vote as one of the bill’s merits. “I don’t care if you’re a regional vice-president for Mercedes,” Powell said before the motor vehicles committee passed the bill, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Powell noted that for non-citizens in the US that are able to get a driver’s license, “it at least ought to have on there ‘non-citizen’”.

Georgia: Ruling upheld for third-party presidential candidates in Georgia | Atlanta Journal Constitution

The federal appeals court in Atlanta on Wednesday upheld a ruling issued last year that found a portion of Georgia’s ballot access laws violated the U.S. Constitution. The one-sentence ruling, by a unanimous three-judge panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, adopted the “well-reasoned opinion” issued last March by U.S. District Judge Richard Story in Atlanta. Story had significantly lowered the number of signatures required for third-party candidates to petition to get on Georgia’s presidential ballot — from tens of thousands to 7,500. The 11th Circuit’s ruling was notable in that it was issued less than a week after it heard arguments on the case – an exceptionally quick turnaround for a ruling by the busy court that oversees cases out of Georgia, Florida and Alabama.

Georgia: Democratic lawmakers hope to expand voters’ rights | Online Athens

Georgia Democrats are facing an uphill climb as they try to expand voters’ rights by allowing same day registration and removing ID requirements. The minority lawmakers control less than one third of the state Legislature, but are putting forth a set of proposed laws to expand voter access. President Donald Trump falsely maintains there was massive voter fraud in the 2016 election. Georgia’s Secretary of State Brian Kemp has been adamant that no illegal votes were cast in the state. … Georgia already offers voters the option of registering online, but three Democratic lawmakers are pushing for registration to be even easier. They introduced bills to allow automatic voter registration when obtaining or renewing a drivers’ license, or during any other interactions with a state agency.

Georgia: State Democrats hope to prevent GOP from redistricting | 11alive

Georgia Democrats hoping to prevent Republicans from controlling the 2020 redistricting process have pre-filed legislation that would remove the power of reapportionment from the General Assembly. Instead, under a bill authored by state Sen. Pat Gardner of Atlanta, reapportionment would be handled by an independent bipartisan commission. Congressional and statewide House and Senate districts are redrawn every 10 years based on new U.S. Census numbers. The majority political party in the legislature controls the redistricting process, and Republicans have held large majorities under Georgia’s gold dome for more than a decade.

Georgia: Two more states say same DHS computer accessed their websites | Atlanta Journal Constitution

The National Association of Secretaries of State wants federal officials to help resolve concerns that a Department of Homeland Security computer made questionable visits to a number of state computers in recent months. The organization, based in Washington, “wants to make sure that we help the states in question get a quick resolution of this matter from the Department of Homeland Security and that there is a way to resolve it to everyone’s satisfaction,” Kay Stimson, spokeswoman for the association, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Thursday. The organization surveyed its members after Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp’s staff traced what it considered a cyber threat against its network to a DHS-owned computer. The agency has denied any attempt to penetrate Georgia’s protected systems. Two states — Kentucky and West Virginia — discovered visits to their systems by the same computer involved in the Georgia incidents. Both of those states, however, said the visits did not appear to be malicious.

Georgia: Kemp questions DHS claim that no hacking attempt was made | The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

While the U.S. Department of Homeland Security claimed last week that there was no attempt to hack into the state’s election computer system, Secretary of State Brian Kemp’s office maintains it’s too soon to know if that’s true. A senior DHS official told Kemp last week that there was no attempt to hack Georgia’s network, but did acknowledge an agency employee left an electronic paper trail that might make it appear something nefarious was afoot. Kemp’s office said Monday that federal officials cannot say that with certainty. “After contacting our office late this afternoon, DHS has still not been able to confirm the origin or intent of this attack,” David Dove, Kemp’s chief of staff and legal counsel, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “This was a reconnaissance scan that raised red flags with our vendor’s counter-threat unit.”

Georgia: Homeland Security Says Georgia Computer Breach Incident Was Likely Inadvertent | Wall Street Journal

The Department of Homeland Security has reached a preliminary conclusion that what appeared to be an attempted breach of Georgia’s computer systems was due to an inadvertent configuration of a U.S. Customs and Border Protection computer, an official familiar with the matter said. The DHS official said a preliminary investigation had traced the incident to the computer of an employee at the U.S. Customs and Border Protection whose job responsibilities included verifying professional licensing information that are often maintained by state secretaries of state.

Georgia: Secretary of State’s office says it has traced an attempted voter hack to the Department of Homeland Security | PCWorld

Georgia’s secretary of state says the state was hit with an attempted hack of its voter registration database from an IP address linked to the federal Department of Homeland Security. The allegation by Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp is one of the more bizarre charges to come up in the recent spate of alarms about voting-system hacks. He said in a Facebook post on Thursday that he had been made aware of the failed attempt to breach the firewall protecting Georgia’s voter registration database. The attack was traced to an Internet Protocol address associated with DHS, he said. This morning I sent a letter to DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson demanding to know why,” he said in the post. The DHS said it had received the letter. “We are looking into the matter. DHS takes the trust of our public and private sector partners seriously, and we will respond to Secretary Kemp directly,” the department said in a statement.

Georgia: After Voting Machine Issue, Officials Blame Testing | Associated Press

A Georgia voting machine apparently malfunctioned as a voter tried to cast an early ballot for Hillary Clinton, but Donald Trump’s name kept showing up instead. But election officials say they still have confidence in the state’s voting machines. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution first reported the account on Thursday. The newspaper says an unnamed Bryan County voter complains that a touch-screen machine incorrectly showed his presidential selection. The voter said he touched the screen to vote for Democrat Clinton, but instead it selected Republican Trump — twice. On his third try, the voter said he was able to select Clinton. A spokesman for Secretary of State Brian Kemp says the county improperly tested the machine. “We are confident that machines are not ‘flipping’ votes,” said Kemp Chief of Staff David Dove in a statement.

Georgia: A growing conflict over voting rights is playing out in Georgia, where the presidential race is tightening | The Washington Post

A growing conflict over voting rights and ballot access is playing out in Georgia, where civil rights activists are trading accusations with Republican elected officials and where the stakes have risen considerably with the state’s new status as a closely watched battleground. Activists said this month that as many as 100,000 Georgia ­voter-registration applications have not been processed. One of the state’s largest counties offered only one early-voting site, prompting hours-long waits for many people at the polls last week. And the state’s top election official has refused to extend ­voter-registration deadlines in counties hardest hit by Hurricane Matthew. These developments have prompted harsh criticism from voting rights activists. Last week, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit to extend registration for six counties affected by the hurricane. Republican Secretary of State Brian Kemp, who oversees elections, responded by taking to Twitter to rail against “left-wing activists,” whom he accused of trying to disrupt the election.

Georgia: Judge won’t extend voter registration deadline | CNN

In the wake of Hurricane Matthew, some Georgia residents living along the coast were unable to register to vote before the deadline. However, a federal judge won’t order officials to extend the deadline given that it could throw a “sizable wrench” in the state’s efforts to get ready for the upcoming presidential election. The ruling stems from a lawsuit filed this week, which claimed that disruptions caused by the storm made it difficult, and, in some cases, impossible, for people to sign up by the October 11 deadline. Other states affected by Matthew — Florida, North Carolina, and South Carolina — have extended deadlines in counties hit by the hurricane. The lawsuit, filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, accused Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal and Secretary of State Brian Kemp of infringing upon residents’ right to vote by refusing to extend the deadline. The storm interfered with voter registration drives, leaving African-Americans disproportionately affected by the state’s refusal to extend the deadline, the lawsuit claimed.

Georgia: ACLU sues Georgia to re-open voter registration in coastal counties | Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Yet another group has filed suit against the state of Georgia demanding that voter registration be re-opened in counties where Hurricane Matthew forced evacuations and government closures. The American Civil Liberties Union filed the suit in federal court Monday. “The state’s failure to extend the voter registration deadline, despite the massive disruptions caused by Hurricane Matthew, means that thousands of Georgians will be prevented from participating in the November election. This is unethical and illegal,” Kathleen Burch, interim counsel for the ACLU of Georgia, said in a statement.

Georgia: North Carolina: Voter registration in Georgia and North Carolina must be extended, judges rule | The Guardian

Judges in Georgia and North Carolina on Friday ordered state election officials to extend voter registration deadlines in some counties due to disruptions caused by Hurricane Matthew, which forced thousands of people to evacuate and temporarily closed some government offices. The judges’ rulings came after Georgia’s governor and the executive director of North Carolina’s state board of elections declined to extend the deadlines. In North Carolina, where the traditional deadline to register was Friday, a state judge ordered election officials to extend it until next Wednesday in 36 eastern counties affected by extensive flooding from the hurricane that left 24 dead. Matthew killed a total of 41 people in the US, and more than 500 in Haiti. In Georgia, William T Moore Jr, a US district court judge, ruled residents of Chatham County, which includes Savannah, must be allowed to register through next Tuesday a week after the original deadline passed. Powerful winds, heavy rain and flooding from Matthew led to downed trees, building damage and power outages around Chatham County, which has 278,000 residents.

Georgia: Lawsuit seeks to extend voter registration deadline | Atlanta Journal Constitution

A federal judge has set a 10 a.m. Friday hearing in Savannah over a lawsuit seeking to reopen Georgia’s voter registration due to Hurricane Matthew. Voter advocates filed the suit Wednesday just before midnight, arguing that an emergency extension of the registration deadline was needed because some coastal residents forced to flee last weekend’s storm did not have enough opportunity to submit applications. The suit requests an extension through Oct. 18 for residents of Chatham County, where local government offices were closed for what would have been the last six days of the voter registration period that ended on Tuesday. It also suggests that the extension could be made available to residents statewide.

Georgia: Concern in Georgia over fewer polling locations | Atlanta Journal Constitution

Memorial Gym in Macon was under renovation in February when local election officials suggested a new temporary polling place for voters in the majority-black neighborhood: the Sheriff’s Office. Local officials said it was a sincere effort to find a safe location to host voters. Residents, who have seen several polling sites close and have raised concerns about racial profiling by police, decided they’d had enough. “When voter suppression still exists and when we have to stand up for what we believe in and what is right, we will do it,” said Gwen Westbrooks, who helped organize a response that stopped the move. Dozens of polling places have closed, consolidated or moved across Georgia since the last presidential election, worrying some voter advocates over how that might affect turnout heading into this year’s contest. Local officials say the closures are money-savers and more efficient, especially at a time when there is increased access to early voting. Some voter activists, however, fear it is a tactic to limit voting access, especially for the state’s minorities.

Georgia: Technology error rejected some Georgia voter registration applications | Atlanta Journal Constitution

Any Georgian who tried to register to vote online using his or her driver’s license number between Friday evening and midday Monday is being encouraged to re-register, after state officials found a problem over that weekend that likely rejected many of the applications. The problem originated in the state Department of Driver Services, during an unsuccessful update at 6:30 p.m. Friday to the agency’s online security certificate. The failure caused an error that blocked instant verification of electronic voter registration applications for people using their driver’s license number to confirm their identity. Election officials with the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office discovered the problem Monday morning, and the system was back online by 12:30 p.m. that afternoon, officials said. Officials could not say how many people were affected by the outage. However, officials with the Secretary of State’s Office said they saw a spike that same weekend in requests for printed paper registration applications.

Georgia: Judge hears arguments in Georgia voter registration lawsuit | Atlanta Journal Constitution

Georgia has agreed to temporarily suspend a requirement that has prevented tens of thousands of residents from registering to vote as it works toward a possible settlement in a federal lawsuit that accused Secretary of State Brian Kemp of disenfranchising minorities ahead of the presidential election. As a result, thousands of voters whose applications have been rejected since Oct. 1, 2014, may be allowed to cast a ballot on Nov. 8. The state has also agreed to stop the automatic rejection of applications that don’t exactly match information in state and federal databases as part of the agreement, which was finalized late Monday. In a letter to U.S. District Judge William O’Kelley, the state Attorney General’s Office said Kemp was voluntarily taking the actions to avoid any unexpected emergency measures imposed by the court as the lawsuit moved forward.

Georgia: Elections Probe Exposes ‘Assault On Voting Rights’ | News One

An investigation into Georgia’s Election Administration claims that state officials at the highest levels have engaged in a “long-term assault on voting rights.” The report by Allied Progress – a national non-profit group – found that officials were systematically making it more difficult for minorities, the elderly, disabled, and low-income voters to cast ballots.The scathing report accuses Georgia’s Secretary of State and Governor of pushing suppression efforts, which include: Strict voter ID requirements, Proof of citizenship, Reduced early voting, and Felon voting right restrictions. Karl Frisch, Executive Director of Allied Progress, joined Roland Martin on NewsOne Now and said, “You’ve got an election administration process from the top on down to the bottom where people have admitted to their partisan motivation and when they thought no one was looking, they sometimes say in public or on social media absolutely racially abhorrent things.” By Frisch’s account, Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp said, “If minorities get registered to vote, they could beat Republicans.” He continued, “As if it would be a bad thing for minorities to get registered to vote.”

Georgia: Secretary of State offers changes to voter name checks targeted by suit | Associated Press

Georgia’s top election official says he has changed a policy that a recent lawsuit said prevented tens of thousands of residents from registering to vote and violated the Voting Rights Act. The lawsuit filed in federal court this month said a policy implemented in 2010 rejects people who apply to register to vote if identifying information on their applications doesn’t exactly match information in databases maintained by the Georgia Department of Driver Services or the Social Security Administration. A letter filed on Friday by attorneys representing Secretary of State Brian Kemp said the office has stopped marking people as ineligible to vote if their names don’t exactly match other government databases and won’t resume the practice without a court decision.

Georgia: Election security questions in Georgia | Atlanta Journal Constitution

The email popped into Georgia Elections Director Chris Harvey’s in-box one Monday morning in August, with four sparse lines punctuated by a smiley face and a YouTube link. “I know you have been asked,” Columbia County Elections Director Nancy Gay wrote of the video, which poll workers, the public and elections officials alike had shared over fears it meant trouble for the November election. “I would love to know your response.” A steady stream of questions about the security of the state’s voting systems has come to the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office over the past two months, according to a review of records by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. That includes the video shared by Gay on Aug. 22, just days after the FBI’s cyber division warned states that it was investigating incidents related to elections data systems in two states believed to be Arizona and Illinois.

Georgia: Suit alleges Georgia blocked thousands of minority voters from rolls | Atlanta Journal Constitution

Less than a week before early voting starts in Georgia’s presidential election, a coalition of voting advocates filed suit Wednesday accusing Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp of disenfranchising thousands of residents by blocking their access to vote. Further, the lawsuit alleges that Georgia’s use of a strict matching process for voter registration has disproportionately affected minority voters across the state, meaning the voter registration applications of black, Latino and Asian Americans in Georgia are more likely than those of white applicants to be rejected. It is an accusation denied strongly by Kemp, who has traveled the state to tout the accessibility of Georgia’s elections.

Georgia: Voter registration process violates the law, lawsuit claims | WSB-TV

Georgia’s voter registration process violates the Voting Rights Act and has prevented tens of thousands of residents, mostly minorities, from registering to vote, according to a federal lawsuit filed Wednesday. Under a policy implemented in 2010, people aren’t added to the voter rolls if identifying information on their applications doesn’t exactly match information in databases maintained by the Georgia Department of Driver Services or the Social Security Administration, the lawsuit says. “What Georgia is doing is denying people the ability to make it onto the registration rolls at the outset, which is what’s so problematic about this matching program,” said Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. The organization said it filed the lawsuit Wednesday in Gainesville, in north Georgia, along with other legal organizations on behalf of a coalition of civil rights groups.

Georgia: Kennesaw State University warns of ‘unauthorized’ voter drives | Atlanta Journal Constitution

A sudden increase of clipboard-wielding operatives roaming Kennesaw State University’s campus could be intended to tamp down African-American balloting in November. Michael Sanseviro, Kennesaw State’s dean of students, sent a memo to students Tuesday morning, warning that “unauthorized individuals are walking around with clipboards claiming they are registering students to vote” in recent weeks. “Some of these unauthorized individuals,” the dean added, “are targeting particular student populations.” A student tipster tells us that the talk on campus is that shenanigans are afoot: The clipboard corps is targeting black students, pretending to register them so they can’t actually vote in November. A campus spokeswoman said she could only confirm that the would-be registrars were not permitted to be on campus, but the dean’s memo suggests this is a familiar problem.

Georgia: State That Exposed 6 Million Voters’ Private Data Says It Doesn’t Need Election Security Aid | ThinkProgress

Georgia’s aging, paperless voting machines have been called a “sitting duck” for hackers. Six million Georgia voters had reams of personal information exposed by a data breach in Republican Secretary of State Brian Kemp’s office earlier this year. Yet Kemp is refusing an offer from the Department of Homeland Security to help shore up the cyber-security of the state’s vulnerable voting machines. Instead, he accused the federal government of attempting to “subvert the Constitution to achieve the goal of federalizing elections under the guise of security.” He said the state is capable of handling its own election security, and opined a hack is “not probable at all.” Less than a year ago, Kemp’s office accidentally mailed out a dozen discs containing the private information of more than six million Georgia voters, including Social Security numbers, birth dates, and driver’s license numbers. At the time, Kemp told state lawmakers that while he is “no expert on data security,” he was confident that no information “made it out to the bad guys.” A year before that, tens of thousands of new voter registrations went missing from the state’s database — the vast majority of them belonging to low-income people of color.

Georgia: District mapping is diluting minority votes in this Georgia county, civil rights groups allege in lawsuit | Los Angeles Times

More than half a century after the passage of the federal Voting Rights Act, the most racially diverse county in the southeastern United States is depriving minority voters of the ability to elect local candidates of their choice, a coalition of civil rights groups has alleged in a federal lawsuit. Although minorities make up more than half the residents of Gwinnett County, Ga., northeast of Atlanta, no black, Latino or Asian American candidate has ever won a seat on the Board of Commissioners or Board of Education or in any other county office, the lawsuit says. The voting strength of minorities has been diluted by county district maps that have been drawn in violation of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, said Kristen Clarke, president of the Lawyers’ Committee, which represents the plaintiffs, including the Georgia National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People and the Georgia Assn. of Latino Elected Officials.

Georgia: Lawsuit: Gwinnett County political districts thwart minority voting rights | Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Voting rights advocates filed a federal lawsuit against Gwinnett County Monday, seeking to overturn county commission and school board districts they say have been drawn to thwart minority voters. The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Atlanta, says minorities in Georgia’s second-largest county have been prevented from electing candidates of their choice, depriving them of a full say on issues ranging from immigration enforcement to school discipline. Though blacks, Latinos and Asians account for more than half of Gwinnett’s population, no minority has ever been elected to the county commission or the school board, according to the lawsuit. The lawsuit against the county and the school board seeks new districts favorable to minorities, as well as the possible elimination of the at-large county commission chairman’s job. An attorney for the plaintiffs said they had not ruled out seeking the changes in advance of this November’s county commission and school board elections, though in the past judges have been reluctant to order such changes so close to an election.

Georgia: Augusta getting 100 used voting machines from Colorado county | The Augusta Chronicle

Colorado’s switch to voting by mail is Augusta’s gain as Adams County, Colo., donates 100 surplus Diebold TSX voting machines to Richmond County Board of Elections. Elections Executive Director Lynn Bailey said a former Columbus, Ga., elections staffer who transferred to Colorado discovered 700 unwanted units there, available to anyone willing to pay shipping and license transfer fees. The machines “were the exact same system we used in Georgia,” Bailey said. “The only change we’ll have to make is we’ll have to update them to Georgia’s software.”

Georgia: Project Vote sues Georgia over voter registration records | Atlanta Journal Constitution

Georgia is being sued for the second time this year over its handling of voter records, this time by a group seeking more information from Secretary of State Brian Kemp about how the state decides to reject applicants trying to register to vote. Project Vote, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit active on voting and election administration policy, said in federal court filings this week that it has sought public records since May 2014 detailing Georgia’s process for reviewing voter registration applications and the subsequent reasons why applications may be rejected.