Georgia: New Plan To Make Voting Even Harder | ThinkProgress

A plan to further slash the availability of early voting is rapidly advancing in Georgia. A committee of state lawmakers voted along party lines last week to slash the state’s early voting days from 21 to 12. The full legislature could call a vote on the cuts at any time, and with Republicans holding a majority of the House seats, the measure would likely pass. More than a third of the state’s voters cast their ballot early in this past election, and demand for early voting was so high that several counties opened the polls on a Sunday for the first time in state history. In 2008, more than half of participants voted early. But the bill’s sponsors say the goal of the cuts is to ensure “uniformity” and “equal access” between counties. Civil rights advocates, including President Francys Johnson of the Georgia NAACP, disagree, and tell ThinkProgress the measure would suppress the votes of the state’s growing minority population. “People of color tend to utilize early voting, and I think at the heart of all of this is an attempt to reduce the opportunities for people to let their voice be heard,” he said. “They’re saying to working Georgians and seniors and communities of color and the young: ‘We’re not interested in your participation.”

Georgia: Republicans look to cut early voting again | MSNBC

Georgia Republicans look set to significantly cut their state’s early voting period — the latest fallout from the Supreme Court’s crippling of the Voting Rights Act. A legislative committee voted on party lines last week to advance a bill that would shorten Georgia’s early voting period to 12 days, from a current maximum of 21 days. It would also bar counties from offering more than four hours of voting on weekends. The state’s early voting period was already cut dramatically just four years ago. The new move comes after a 2014 election in which 44% of voters — disproportionately minorities — cast their ballot early. Many counties, responding to popular demand, offered Sunday voting for the first time. Rep. Carolyn Hugley, a member of the Democratic legislative leadership, said the scheme is an effort to produce an electorate that’s more favorable to the GOP. “We cannot choose the electorate, the electorate chooses us,” Hugley said. “And it looks like somebody has an idea that they want to choose who is going to make the decisions, based on the patterns of how people vote.”

Georgia: Bill to cut early voting advances | Atlanta Constitution Journal

A revised bill that would limit early voting to 12 days passed a key committee vote Wednesday. The House Governmental Affairs Committee voted 9-5 to advance House Bill 194. Sponsored by Rep. Mark Hamilton, R-Cumming, the bill originally would have required every county to be open on the Sunday during the early-voting period. But in an effort to please religious conservatives, the bill now makes Sunday voting optional. Any county choosing not to open the polls on Sunday would be required to allow access to the polls on an additional Saturday.

Georgia: Republican Bill Would Cut Early Voting Days, Mandate Sunday Voting | WABE

A Republican-sponsored bill in the Georgia House would shorten the number of early voting days from 21 to 12. Rep. Mark Hamilton, R-Cumming, said his bill is about creating a more uniform voting system. “Cities and counties all over the state have different days, different times … The purpose of this was really uniformity,” said Hamilton. Under the bill, polling locations would be open on the 12 consecutive days before elections.

Georgia: Shortening advance voting stirs opposition | Online Athens

Shrinking Georgia’s early voting period by four days was billed Tuesday as a cost-savings measure, but at least one voter group said the economy gained wasn’t worth the price in lost convenience. Rep. Mark Hamilton, R-Cumming, introduced House Bill 194 the day before, but it became public when it was given its first “reading” in the state House and assigned to a committee for consideration. He said it will simplify the various schedules individual counties have used for when early voting is available and makes Sunday voting mandatory in every county.

Georgia: Butler rep seeks quick voter application processing | Macon Telepgraph

A former Taylor County voting registrar says every registrar in the state and their oversight agency should face the threat of a lawsuit if they do not process voting applications quickly enough. “Forty-five days is more than enough, in my opinion,” said Patty Bentley, now a state representative and author of a new bill setting that deadline. Her House Bill 130 would allow anyone whose registration is not processed within 45 days to take either the county registrar or the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office to court.

Georgia: Appeals Judges: Fayette voting rights case to go to trial | Atlanta Journal-Constitution

A contentious voting rights case involving Fayette County and the NAACP appears headed to trial. The three-judge panel in the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals sent the case back to the lower court for trial. “We conclude that this case warrants a limited remand so that the district court may conduct a trial,” the judges said in their 26-page decision. The decision came down late Wednesday afternoon. The appeals court ruling is the latest chapter in a three-and-half-year old legal fight over Fayette’s voting system.

Georgia: Fayette residents urge officials to end voting rights fight | Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Fayette County residents implored county officials Thursday night to abandon their ongoing fight over the county’s new voting system, calling it a costly waste of time. “I strongly urge the new commission… take another look at what’s going on with district voting,” said Terrence Williams, who lives in District 5, the mostly minority district created under the court-ordered district plan. “Take a deeper look and spend our money wisely. There’s other things we need to spend our money on.” “Don’t – I beg you – don’t step back,” resident Larry Younginer said. “I subscribe to the theory that change is difficult but change is necessary. Change is going to happen whether you like it or not.”

Georgia: Fayette County legal fees in voting rights dispute: more than $434,000 and counting | Atlanta Journal Constitution

Taking a stand can be quite an expensive proposition. In the case of Fayette County, it totals more than $434,000 and counting. That’s the latest figure on legal fees the county has spent on its three and a half-year battle with the NAACP over its nearly two-century-old at-large voting system. No blacks had ever served on the county school board or county commission under that system. U.S. District Judge Timothy Batten scrapped the at-large system and told the county to adopt a district voting system to enable blacks to finally have a chance to win county-level seats.

Georgia: Voting case mirrors national struggle | Atlanta Constitution Journal

Four years ago, black candidates won a majority of seats on the Brooks County school board, which had always been controlled by whites. They did it through an organized absentee ballot effort that generated close to 1,000 votes. Here’s what happened next: Armed agents of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and the Secretary of State questioned more than 400 of those voters, a small percentage of whom said they did not fill out their own ballot or could not recall doing so. A dozen organizers, all of them black, were indicted for more than 100 election law violations, each of which carried the potential of up to 10 years in prison. The most common charge was illegal possession of a ballot, often for the act of taking a willing voter’s completed, sealed ballot, which they said they had voted as they wished, to the mailbox for them.

Georgia: 40,000 ‘Missing’ Voters in Georgia Are Unlikely to Regain their Ballot | New Republic

ver the past few months, upwards of 40,000 voter registrations from three counties in Georgia have reportedly gone missing. The groups that registered most of these voters, the Georgia chapter of the NAACP and the New Georgia Project, filed a lawsuit against Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp, alleging that most of those missing registrations are from “members of the underrepresented classes of voters.” The lawsuit went before the court on Friday October 24. By the following Tuesday, the judge had dismissed the case, writing that “there has been no failure of clear legal duty,” and asserting that there was still time for the missing registrations to appear. The stakes in Georgia are high. The Senate contest between David Perdue and Michelle Nunn has hovered within a couple of percentage points. The Governor’s race between Nathan Deal and Jason Carter is just as close. The loss of tens of thousands of voter registrations is a big deal. In the four years that Brian Kemp has served as Georgia’s secretary of state, most of the issues that various voting rights activist groups have flagged have been about voter identification. This isn’t the first time, or the second, or even the third that Kemp has clashed with civil rights groups over voter registration. In 2013, when the U.S. Supreme Court found that a Georgia law requiring first-time voters to show proof of U.S. citizenship (that went above and beyond federal requirements) violated the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, Kemp called the decision “disappointing.” Last Monday, on the eve of the dismissal of the lawsuit, the Atlanta Journal Constitution reported that eight protestors were arrested because they refused to leave Kemp’s office after breaking off from a larger rally and sit-in at the state Capitol.

Georgia: Minority Voter Registrations Unprocessed in Georgia Senate Race | Bloomberg

At least 40,000 minority voter registration applications had yet to be processed as of last week in Georgia as a close vote for a U.S. Senate seat approaches. The applications are among more than 80,000 submitted since March by a voter registration organization called the New Georgia Project, along with the NAACP and other groups. New Georgia revealed the figure in an affidavit filed in Fulton County Superior Court on Oct. 24.

Georgia: Parties brace for war over voter registrations in Georgia Senate race | The Hill

Georgia’s tight Senate race could be headed for the courtroom after voters head to the ballot box. A state judge ruled earlier this week against civil rights groups seeking to force the Georgia secretary of State to account for roughly 40,000 voter registrations that were filed but allegedly haven’t shown up on the voting rolls. Those voters could have a big impact on the tight open seat contest between Democrat Michelle Nunn and Republican David Perdue. That initial ruling raises the possibility of further post-election legal action — and is likely to increase the number of potential provisional ballots, the type of votes that get fought over in court in close elections. Civil rights groups are vowing to fight to make sure every new voter they helped register gets their vote counted after next Tuesday. And both parties are quietly preparing for chaos in close races like the current deadlocked battle, where the results could be fought out in the courts as well as in a runoff. At issue are a large chunk of the more than 100,000 new voters registered by the state NAACP and the New Georgia Project, a nonpartisan group focused on registering African-American, Asian-American and Hispanic voters.

Georgia: 50,000 Missing Georgia Voter-Registration Applications? Nothing to See Here | The Daily Beast

Voting-rights advocates are running out of time in Georgia, where civil-rights groups say more than 50,000 new voter registrations have gone missing since they submitted them to state and local officials earlier this year. But with Election Day less than a week away, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, Brian Kemp, is insisting that every voter-registration application submitted by Georgians before the registration deadline has been processed. The missing potential voters? He says there aren’t any. On Tuesday, a county judge sided with Kemp and rejected a request by the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, the NAACP, and the New Georgia Project to intervene in the dispute, on which the two sides disagree on nearly every detail, including whether there is a problem at all. “This decision guarantees that there are going to be significant numbers of people who will be disenfranchised and not be put onto the voter-registration rolls even though they are eligible to vote,” said Julie Houk, senior counsel for the Voting Rights Project of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, after the judge’s ruling, which the groups will likely appeal. “What good is early voting if people’s names aren’t on the rolls to vote?”

Georgia: Court Ruling May ‘Wreak Havoc’ On Election Day | Huffington Post

Voting rights advocates are considering legal options after a Georgia judge denied their lawsuit that would have compelled the state to add 40,000 newly registered voters to the rolls. Judge Christopher Brasher said voters whose registration applications were lost may cast provisional ballots in next week’s election. But he declined to force Republican Secretary of State Brian Kemp and counties to ensure voting for the thousands of new voters. The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the New Georgia Project, and the Georgia branch of the NAACP are weighing whether to appeal to the Georgia Supreme Court. “You’ve got a situation that was designed to wreak havoc on the elections office if a large number of provisional ballots are cast,” Julie Houk, a senior special counsel with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights’ voting rights project, told The Huffington Post Wednesday. She said provisional ballots are “not an adequate remedy” because “registered voters are entitled to cast a regular ballot.”

Georgia: Judge declines to intervene in ‘missing’ voters lawsuit | Atlanta Journal-Constitution

A Georgia judge declined Tuesday to intervene in Georgia’s voter registration process, letting stand existing measures by state and local election officials to help applicants ahead of the Nov. 4 election. The decision came after a two-hour hearing Friday, during which Fulton County Superior Court Judge Christopher Brasher seemed skeptical of a lawsuit that sought what he called an “extraordinary legal remedy.” “What does the law require that they haven’t done?” Brasher asked during the hearing. “That’s what I’m a bit fuzzy about here.”

Georgia: Judge may enter Georgia voter registration dispute | Associated Press

A Georgia state judge is weighing whether it’s appropriate for him to intervene in a dispute over more than 50,000 voter registration records in one of the nation’s most politically contested states. Lawyers for the NAACP and a voter registration group that recruited new minority voters allege that elections officials have misplaced or mishandled more than half of the 86,000 voter registration applications that they collected ahead of an Oct. 6 deadline. Republican Secretary of State Brian Kemp and elections officials in several counties — most of them majority Democratic — say they are correctly processing all the forms. Attorneys for the groups said they feared that would-be voters, several of whom attended Friday’s hearing, would not have their ballots counted, and they asked Fulton County Superior Court Judge Christopher Brasher to compel the counties and Kemp to confirm the voters’ registration or explain any denials. “What does the law require that they haven’t done?” Brasher asked, noting that Georgia election law doesn’t set specific deadlines for county elections boards to process applications.

Georgia: Concern Over New-Voter Registration In Georgia Ahead Of Election | NPR

This election season is proving to be tough for Democrats, but many believe they can turn the red state of Georgia blue with the help of new voters. One voter registration campaign led by the New Georgia Project, a “nonpartisan effort” according to its website, has targeted black, Latino and Asian-American residents. The organization’s parent group, Third Sector Development, is currently engaged in a legal battle with election officials over more than 40,000 voter registration applications that, the group says, are missing from Georgia’s voter logs. This month, that organization, along with the NAACP and other civil rights groups, filed a lawsuit against five counties and Georgia’s Secretary of State Brian Kemp, who oversees elections in the state.

Georgia: Records cast more doubt on Georgia fraud probe claims | MSNBC

A bitter feud between a voter registration group and Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State has seen a lawsuit, claims of voter suppression, a politically motivated effort to hype voter fraud, and fears that large numbers of minority voters could be disenfranchised. But in the final analysis, it perhaps says just as much about less sensational but more intractable problems in the way we run elections. How the fracas gets resolved may play a key role in Georgia’s tight U.S. Senate race, which could hang on minority turnout, and might end up determining control of the chamber next year. The latest twist in the saga came Monday evening, when a local news report cast doubt on claims made by Secretary of State Brian Kemp to justify a controversial investigation he launched last month into the New Georgia Project (NGP), a voter registration group working in minority areas.

Georgia: Records at odds with voter fraud probe claim | WXIA

Documents obtained from Secretary of State Brian Kemp’s office appear to contradict Kemp’s claim that a voter fraud probe was based on numerous complaints from counties across Georgia. For weeks, Democrats have hinted that Secretary of State Brian Kemp is trying to keep newly registered Democrats off the voters rolls. Kemp, a Republican, makes no apologies for investigating the New Georgia Project — which has focused on registering Democratic-leaning minority voters. Last week, Kemp said again that reports of potential voter fraud led to the probe.

Georgia: Legal action — and mass voter confusion — looms in Georgia as Election Day nears | The Washington Post

A fight over alleged voter registration fraud in Georgia appears headed to the courts as early voting begins in the state, amid concerns that tens of thousands of Georgians who show up to vote may learn instead that their registration forms were never processed. More than 81,000 new voters were registered during this campaign cycle by the New Georgia Project, which targets unregistered African-Americans, Latinos, and Asian Americans. Increased minority turnout in November could make the difference for Democrats in the state’s tight gubernatorial race between Gov. Nathan Deal (R) and Jason Carter (D) and the increasingly competitive U.S. Senate race between David Perdue (R) and Michelle Nunn (D). “When you talk to Republican campaign operatives, yeah, they’re quite worried” about the long term electoral impact of growth in minority turnout, said Charles Bullock, a political science professor at the University of Georgia. “They know the Georgia electorate isn’t going to become whiter.”

Georgia: Kemp says ‘missing’ voters accounted for in Georgia | Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Secretary of State Brian Kemp on Thursday blasted accusations that his office has failed to help thousands of voters register to vote, saying “we should not have to waste valuable resources on a frivolous lawsuit.” It’s the first time Kemp has commented since the national Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights filed suit against him and five Georgia counties last week, asking a state judge to make sure more than 55,000 people will be able to vote in the Nov. 4 election. Kemp, however, said his office has now confirmed nearly 40,000 of those voters are active and on the rolls despite accusations to the contrary. He said almost 10,000 more are on the state’s “pending” voter list, meaning those voters have been asked to provide more information to confirm their identities.

Georgia: Claims of tens of thousands of missing applications prompts a closer look | CBS46

The New Georgia Project claims 47,867 voter registration applications cannot be found across five counties; Fulton, DeKalb, Clayton, Chatham and Muscogee. They claim to have turned in 7,481 applications that cannot be located to DeKalb County. The group says they have checked the voter list and the list of pending applications at the county level to no avail. After a paper application is turned in, the county has to input the applications information to the system. The system will then attempt to verify the information and approve the registration. If approved the voter is added to the voter list. If an application cannot be verified, or if it cannot be input into the system for verification due to an error or missing information, it is placed on the pending list and a letter is supposed to be sent to the applicant at the address on the application.

Georgia: Voter Registration Drive in Georgia Leads to Lawsuit | Wall Street Journal

With a little over three weeks to go before elections in close races for U.S. Senate and governor, an escalating fight between Georgia’s Republican secretary of state and a Democratic-leaning voter registration group is moving to court. Third Sector Development Inc., the parent nonprofit of the New Georgia Project that has been working to register minority voters, has filed suit in Fulton County Superior Court against Secretary of State Brian Kemp and five county election boards, claiming officials have failed to process tens of thousands of voter applications ahead of the Nov. 4 vote. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People joined the suit, which calls on the court to force the secretary of state and the boards to speed up processing the applications.

Georgia: State official sued over voter registration backlog | Politico

A coalition of civil rights organizations on Friday sued the Georgia secretary of state’s office and five counties over an alleged backlog of 40,000 voter registration forms. The lawsuit was filed just days before early voting begins on Monday in the state, which features tightly contested races for both governor and Senate this year. Filed in Fulton County Superior Court, the suit asks a judge to order the counties and Secretary of State Brian Kemp to immediately process the remaining forms. A Democratic-backed group called the New Georgia Project contends that 40,000 of the people it signed up have yet to appear on the voter rolls or be listed as “pending.” In some cases, they contend, those people registered months ago.

Georgia: Leaders worry over 42,000 missing voters | Henry Daily Herald

Just one week away from the start of early voting, at least 42,000 residents who registered to vote still haven’t been given that right. Some applied as far back as April. “The Secretary of State is supposed to represent all the people — Democrats, Republicans, Independents, registered and unregistered voters alike,” Congressman John Lewis said Monday, during a press conference hosted by the New Georgia Project in Atlanta. “But it seems like the Secretary of State of Georgia has picked sides in this election. It seems he is not on the side of the people of this state.” Stacey Abrams, the Democratic party leader in the state House of Representatives, leads the New Georgia Project, an initiative that aims to register minority groups to vote. The initiative was successful in registering 86,000 new voters — but Abrams said the group can’t understand why half those new voters haven’t shown up on Georgia’s official list of registered voters, yet.

Georgia: Why was the New Georgia Project subpoenaed? | MSNBC

Republican officials in Georgia, a state that will host some very competitive statewide elections this year, haven’t exactly been champions of voting rights recently. One GOP state senator, for example, recently complained about Sunday voting in an Atlanta shopping mall “dominated by African American shoppers.” Around the same time, we learned about remarks Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp (R) made in July, when he expressed concern about Democrats “registering all these minority voters that are out there.” It’s against this backdrop that the Republican Secretary of State – Georgia’s top elections official – also subpoenaed the New Georgia Project, which happens to be the driving force behind the state’s largest voter-registration campaign. As Joan Walsh noted, the recently launched probe is so broad, it could tie up the voter-registration organization “indefinitely.”

Georgia: On one side voter registration probe a big deal, on the other not so much | Online Athens

Beyond the headlines and campaign rhetoric, the state’s investigation into possible irregularities by a Democratic-leaning group’s efforts to register blacks, Asians and Hispanics to vote has many facets, and not all are yet known. The investigation into the New Georgia Project began in early May, when local registrars started reporting to the Secretary of State’s Elections Division that voters had complained of intimidation and that documents turned in by the group appeared suspicious. In all, officials in 13 counties so far — from Effingham and Toombs in the southeast to Coweta and Gwinnett in the northwest — have submitted suspicious documents to state investigators. Since Secretary of State Brian Kemp is a Republican, Democrats and officials of the New Georgia Project have alleged in the media that the investigation is a GOP attempt at minority voter suppression. But many of the complaints that triggered the probe originated in Democrat-controlled counties like Muscogee, DeKalb and Fulton.

Georgia: State says 25 voter applications of 85,000 “confirmed” forgeries | Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Investigators backed away Wednesday from allegations a Democratic-backed group may have organized voter registration fraud, saying they can confirm 25 applications of more than 85,000 submitted to the Georgia Secretary of State’s office. Chief investigator Chris Harvey, however, said the office needed more information from the New Georgia Project to confirm no more fraudulent forms existed — already, it has identified another 26 applications as suspicious. The state has extended a deadline for the group to get investigations such information through Sept. 26. Harvey spoke after the group’s leaders said Secretary of State Brian Kemp may be ignoring more than 51,000 unprocessed voter registration applications to instead pursue what they called “a witch hunt.” With the state’s Oct. 6 registration deadline quickly approaching, state House Minority Leader Stacey Abrams, D-Atlanta,and more than a dozen civil rights and religious leaders who support the New Georgia Project called on Kemp —the state’s top elections official — to focus on ensuring ballot access to thousands of new voters they and others have signed up this election year.

Georgia: Election Chief Probes Voter Fraud Amid Tight Senate Race | Bloomberg

Georgia’s top elections official gave a nonprofit group that has registered more than 85,000 minority voters until tomorrow to produce every record it has, in what critics say is an effort to suppress minority voting in November’s tight race for the U.S. Senate. Secretary of State Brian Kemp, a Republican, is accusing the New Georgia Project of fraud in its drive to reach the more than 800,000 minority Georgians not on the rolls. Kemp served a subpoena on organizers a day after first lady Michelle Obama urged on the effort at an Atlanta appearance. Kemp spokesman Jared Thomas said the office received fraud reports from several county elections offices. “We had clear evidence,” he said. “We need to know the totality of it.”