Georgia: Rep. Stacey Abrams investigated for voter fraud | WXIA

An investigation is underway into claims of voter fraud involving the state’s highest ranking Democratic elected official. The Secretary of State Brian Kemp’s office launched an investigation after they allegedly received complaints of possible voter fraud from election offices in nearly a dozen counties. “Our investigators were talking to the counties and to individuals who’d had their names forged on voter registration documents,” Kemp said. “You know that’s fraud.” Kemp’s office has slapped Rep. Stacey Abrams’ organization, the New Georgia Project with a subpoena. demanding that they turn over all documents related to their efforts to “register voters, store voter information, contact voters or any other canvassing project.”

Georgia: GOPer opposes early voting because it will boost black turnout | MSNBC

A Republican lawmaker in Georgia has sparked outrage by suggesting he opposes new Sunday voting hours because they’ll primarily benefit African-Americans—then explaining that he simply “would prefer more educated voters.” But take away the overt racism, and state Rep. Fran Millar was only giving the official Republican position on the issue. After a visit to Atlanta by Michelle Obama to register black voters in advance of Georgia’s closely-fought U.S. Senate race, Millar took to Facebook to criticize a county official for green-lighting Sunday voting at a local mall. “Michelle Obama comes to town and Chicago politics comes to DeKalb,” Millar wrote. “Per Jim Galloway of the [Atlanta Journal Constitution], this location is dominated by African American shoppers and it is near several large African American mega churches such as New Birth Missionary Baptist.” He added: “Is it possible church buses will be used to transport people directly to the mall since the poll will open when the mall opens? If this happens, so much for the accepted principle of separation of church and state.”

Georgia: State launches fraud investigation into voter registration group | WSBTV

Channel 2 Action News has learned Georgia’s secretary of state is investigating allegations of forged voter registration applications and demanding records from a voter registration group with ties to one of the state’s highest ranking Democrats. A subpoena was sent to the New Georgia Project and its parent organization Third Sector Development on Tuesday. The organization is a project of the nonprofit organization Third Sector Development, which was founded and is led by House Minority Leader Stacey Abrams. The subpoena demands all documents be turned over to the State Election Board’s investigators by Sept. 16.

Georgia: Justice Department suspends most poll watching | CNN

For the first time in decades, voters in Georgia are going to the polls Tuesday without the chance of having Justice Department observers inside their polling places. CNN has learned that’s because Justice Department lawyers in recent months have determined they no longer have legal authority to unilaterally assign poll observers after the Supreme Court ruling invalidating key sections of the Voting Rights Act. The department has suspended posting observers inside polling stations except for in nine jurisdictions in seven states covered by separate court orders, government officials tell CNN. The internal legal finding hadn’t been made public before. Observers had the authority to be inside polling places, and the department may still send monitors who keep an eye outside polling precincts. A spokeswoman for the Justice Department’s civil rights division declined to comment.

Georgia: Cost of a runoff; who can participate | WRDW

And the winner is? For some, that answer is undecided until July. Election day is over, but not all races have been won. That means it’s time to start planning for a runoff. Locally, Ben Hasan and Bob Finnegan will compete for the District 6 seat in the Augusta Commission. Corey Johnson and Harold Jones II will face off for Hardie Davis’ old position as State Senator for District 22. A runoff in a primary election is different than any other. If you did not vote on Tuesday, you can still vote in the runoff. Once again, Richmond County voters will have the power to choose even the ones who didn’t hit the polls on the 20th. “There are special rules in place in a primary that don’t exist in any other type election. For those people who did not vote at all yesterday, they may vote in the runoff,” Richmond County Board of Elections Director Lynn Bailey said.

Georgia: After Wisconsin Voter ID Ruling, What’s Next For Georgia? | WABE

Could a recent ruling on the constitutionality of voter ID requirements affect Georgia’s law? That’s the question after a federal judge in Wisconsin earlier this week struck down a law requiring voters to show a state photo ID at polls, a policy in place in about half the U.S. states, including Georgia. In his ruling Tuesday, U.S. District Court Judge Lynn Adelman said Wisconsin’s voter ID law violates the U.S. Constitution and the Voting Rights Act, adding the law disproportionately affects minority and low-income individuals. Laughlin McDonald, director emeritus of the American Civil Liberties Union Voting Rights Project, said the future implications of the Wisconsin ruling are unclear, but called it “significant.”

Georgia: Voter registration begins online | The Newnan Times-Herald

The distribution of absentee ballots for military voters began this week for the May 20 general election primary and non-partisan election. While paper ballots for military voters must be available for at least 45 days before an election, in-person early voting for the election won’t begin until April 28. Local elections officials will begin “logic and accuracy testing” on the absentee ballots on Monday. There are three weeks remaining to register to vote. And registering has been made easier with the launch of an online voter registration system. Georgians with a valid Georgia driver’s license will now be able to register to vote or change their address online.

Georgia: State initiates online voter registration | The Daily Tribune News

With a new system going live Monday, Georgia residents will now be able to go online and register to vote. “In 2012, I worked with legislative leaders to craft a law that would allow for online voter registration,” said Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp in a press release. “We did this because Georgians deserve to be able to register to vote or change their information with as much ease as possible. This will not only provide benefits to the voter, but also for all 159 Georgia counties.” Locally, Bartow County Election Supervisor Joseph Kirk believed the online registration system will help his office keep the number of voters up, but he did not predict a large increase in registered voters.

Georgia: Westside valedictorian first to sign up as Georgia launches on-line voter registration | The Augusta Chronicle

The first Georgian to register to vote online, Westside High School valedictorian Eniolufe Asebiomo, signed up Monday before an audience of hundreds of elections officials from across the state. Asebiomo called the new system, unveiled Monday by Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp, “really a good step that innovates technology into the civic process” at a conference of elections officials at the Augusta Convention Center. Kemp said the system will save counties time and money. It requires new voters to have a Georgia driver’s license.

Georgia: Move to slash early voting defeated in Georgia | Facing South

It’s been a major conflict in the voting wars: Across the South and country, Republican-led states have moved to shrink the early voting period before Election Day. But this week, voting rights advocates scored a key victory in a state where the GOP enjoys a strong majority. On Thursday, March 20, the Georgia House declined to pass HB 891, a measure that would have allowed more than 500 cities and towns to reduce early voting from three weeks to one week. The bill applied only to municipal elections, but it was considered an important test of support for efforts to reduce early voting in state and county contests in the future. But after passing the state Senate by a 36-16 margin, HB 891 died in the House as the General Assembly closed its 2014 session, ensuring that Georgia won’t see any restrictions to early voting until the issue is taken up again in 2015.

Georgia: State may cut back city early voting | WMAZ

Under the gold dome in Atlanta Wednesday, the House of Representatives approved a measure to reduce the number of early voting days for municipal elections. But the amended version of House Bill 891 gives city officials around the state the option of deciding whether to have one week of early voting before an election or keeping the early voting period at three weeks. It now heads to the Georgia Senate for consideration. The proposal surfaced after some city officials around the state complained it’s inefficient and costly to staff polling places for three weeks, especially in rural areas where one or two people vote each day. However, the NAACP and other agencies opposed the measure, maintaining it could infringe on some people’s voting rights.

Georgia: Lawmaker seeks shorter early-voting periods for small cities | Online Athens

The League of Women Voters slammed legislation Tuesday requested by small cities to shorten early-voting periods from 21 days to six, including one Saturday. Cities complain that staffing three people as poll workers for days when almost no one shows up to vote is too costly for local taxpayers, according to Tom Gehl, a lobbyist for the Georgia Municipal Association. “The requirement that they stay open can be really expensive, especially with a part-time staff,” he said. That argument doesn’t wash with Elizabeth Poythress, president of the League of Women Voters of Georgia.

Georgia: Governor Deal signs bill moving elections to May | The Augusta Chronicle

A Georgia House bill with the effect of moving Augusta mayor and commission elections to May 20 is the first signed by Gov. Nathan Deal this year. “The General Assembly acted swiftly on this issue, and I have as well, so that local election officials and candidates can prepare,” Deal said in a statement. House Bill 310 aligns state and local nonpartisan elections, such as the mayor and commission races and two state court judgeships, and state party primaries, with the May 20 date of the federal primary, which was set by a federal judge to accommodate military voters.

Georgia: Election calendar will shorten legislative session | Online Athens

The legislative session that begins Jan. 13 will be quicker than any in recent years, and that will create a wave of changes that will ripple through Georgia. When the U.S. Department of Justice sued the state for not allowing ample time for voters overseas with the military to get their ballots counted, U.S. District Judge Steve Jones’ decision last year created the tidal wave. He agreed with the DOJ that the primary runoff period wasn’t sufficiently long enough to get ballots from soldiers, sailors and airmen in time to be counted before the runoff voting begins. Jones decreed that the primary must be held no later than June 3 rather than the July 15 date in state law. So, state leaders wanting to avoid low turnouts during the Memorial Day period picked May 24 as the date they’ll ask the legislature to set into law.

Georgia: Attorney general to investigate Fulton County voting | CBS

The Georgia Attorney General’s Office is expected to investigate the voting problems reported in Fulton County during the 2012 presidential election. The State Election Board voted on Tuesday to refer the case to the attorney general after reviewing the results of an investigation by the secretary of state. In November 2012, voters encountered long lines, confused poll workers and voter registration rolls that were not up to date. The report by the secretary of state concluded: These multiple failures seem to be linked to poor planning, insufficient training, poor communication and poor decision-making. Perhaps most troubling is the apparent utter disregard for the security and integrity of practically the entirety of the provisional ballot process. Almost 10,000 votes were essentially un-documented or under-documented and under-secured.

Georgia: GOP dusts off Jim Crow tactic: Changing election date | MSNBC

For years, Augusta, Georgia, has held its local elections in November, when turnout is high. But last year, state Republicans changed the election date to July, when far fewer blacks make it to the polls. The effort was blocked under the Voting Rights Act (VRA) by the federal government, which cited the harm that the change would do to minorities. But now that the Supreme Court has badly weakened the landmark civil rights law, the move looks to be back on. The city’s African-Americans say they know what’s behind it. “It’s a maneuver to suppress our voting participation,” Dr. Charles Smith, the president of Augusta’s NACCP branch, told msnbc. The dispute is flaring at a time when Georgia, long deep-red, is becoming increasingly politically competitive, and Democrats have nominated two candidates with famous names for high-profile statewide races next year. Voting rights experts say the events in Augusta may be a sign of what’s to come—or even of what’s already happening. In June, the Supreme Court invalidated Section 5 of the VRA, which had required certain jurisdictions, mostly in the south, to submit election changes to the federal government to ensure they didn’t harm minority voters. Since then, harsh voting restrictions put in place by several southern states have generated national news coverage—Texas’ voter ID law and North Carolina’s sweeping voting bill most prominent among them. But most of the changes stopped by Section 5 weren’t statewide laws. Instead, they were measures adopted at the local or county level.

Georgia: Voting Rights At Risk in Georgia | Rolling Stone

In June, the Supreme Court’s Shelby v. Holder decision disarmed Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, freeing nine states – mostly in the South – from having to submit election procedure changes for the Justice Department’s approval. The vast majority of voting laws that the department objected to as discriminatory came from towns and counties, rather than the state level. Since the ruling, such localities have seen both quiet changes to election code and also deep uncertainties among civil rights advocates who long relied on this key provision of the Voting Rights Act. The state of Georgia alone offers many examples. The city of Athens, for instance, is considering a proposal to eliminate nearly half of its 24 polling sites in favor of creating two early voting centers – both located inside police stations. Madelyn Clare Powell, a longtime civil rights activist in Athens, worries that some voters cannot regard police stations as neutral territory. “There is a major intimidation factor here – these police stations are seen by some in the community as hostile territory,” says Powell, citing historical tension between white police forces and minority communities in the region. Local activists also fear that the poll closures disproportionally impact neighborhoods with higher shares of minorities and college students, requiring three-hour bus rides for some public-transit dependent voters.

Georgia: Federal judge ruling splits federal, state, local primary elections | Columbus Ledger Enquirer

A North Georgia federal judge has reset next year’s election calendar, and elections officials, state lawmakers and other politicians are pondering the impact the decision will have. As it stands now, there would be a federal primary in early June 2014 that includes the congressional races. In the middle of July, the state primary would be held for all General Assembly seats and other state and judicial offices on the ballot. In Muscogee County, it would also include the nonpartisan races, such as mayor, five Columbus council seats and five school board seats. U.S. District Judge Steve Jones’ ruling came after the federal government filed suit more than a year ago against the state, alleging Georgia wasn’t allowing enough time for members of the military and others living overseas to return absentee ballots in federal runoff elections.

Georgia: Georgia voter I.D. law blocked | Atlanta Journal-Constitution

This week’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling partly blocks Georgia from enforcing a law requiring would-be voters to prove U.S. citizenship, Secretary of State Brian Kemp said Wednesday. In a 7-2 decision Monday, the court ruled a similar statute in Arizona is pre-empted by federal law. Passed in 2009, Georgia’s law requires voter registration applicants to provide proof of U.S. citizenship, such as copies of passports or birth certificates. Kemp, however, said Georgia has never been able to enforce that statute because it has not been given access to a federal immigration database it could use to confirm the U.S. citizenship of those seeking to vote. He said he is now considering asking the U.S. Election Assistance Commission to add new instructions on federal voter registration forms so Georgia can require proof of U.S. citizenship. In its ruling, the court indicated that is a possible pathway forward for Arizona. “We will put all options on the table — whether we need to talk to the governor or Legislature or the Attorney General’s Office,” Kemp said.

Georgia: Uncounted votes | wsbtv.com

More than 10,000 Georgia voters in the last presidential election were forced to vote on paper instead of electronically. A Channel 2 Action News investigation found that thousands of votes didn’t count, though many should have. State investigators still don’t even know how many people actually voted. “Having looked forward to voting for a long time and following the election, I was very excited to go there and to cast my vote,” said 18-year-old Bailey Sumner. But when she arrived at her Sandy Springs precinct, the poll workers refused to give her a ballot. “They told me that I wasn’t on the list, and that I couldn’t vote,” Sumner told Channel 2 investigative reporter Jodie Fleischer.

Georgia: Fayette County at-large elections illegal, fedeal judge rules | Associated Press

A federal court struck down Fayette County’s at-large method of electing members to certain county offices, saying in an opinion released Tuesday that the method was a violation of the Voting Rights Act. A U.S. District Court judge ruled on a lawsuit that was filed in 2011 and ordered the county to establish an alternative to the at-large election method. With Fayette County being about 70 percent white and 20 percent black, according to Census statistics from 2011, officials from the NAACP Legal Defense Fund officials said the at-large method virtually guaranteed that African-American candidates would never be elected to the County Board of Commissioners or the County Board of Education.

Georgia: House Approves Nonpartisan Elections | 13wmaz.com

Nonpartisan elections moved a step closer Tuesday when the Georgia House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved them for several local offices. The House lawmakers approved four bills that included nonpartisan elections for the new consolidated Macon-Bibb County governments, the Bibb County Board of Elections and the Macon Water Authority. They also included the coroner, Probate Judge, Civil Court Judge and State Court Solicitor. The legislation now heads to Gov. Nathan Deal for consideration. If he signs them into law, they’ll head to the U.S. Department of Justice, which will determine if the law complies with the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Two weeks ago, the Senate approved nonpartisan elections for those positions. In both chambers, Republicans largely supported the measures while Democrats opposed them.

Georgia: Fulton County disputes vote tampering allegations | www.ajc.com

Fulton County’s interim elections director denies her staff tampered with polling records by adding dozens of voters’ names to tally sheets last year. It wasn’t fraud, Sharon Mitchell says, but correcting mistakes. But Secretary of State Brian Kemp maintains the county’s actions were likely illegal. Not only did the department’s missteps cause more people to use paper ballots than the entire rest of the state combined, Kemp says the county also mishandled those ballots in the aftermath and may have counted some votes twice. Documents unveiled by a state investigator last week showed someone used a red pen to add more than 50 names to the list of people using paper ballots at one precinct and five names to the list from another precinct.

Georgia: State investigators: Fulton election documents were altered | www.ajc.com

Someone altered Fulton County voter records after last year’s presidential election, using a red pen to add names to tally sheets of voters using paper ballots and marking that their votes all counted. Who is responsible remains a mystery, but it happened after managers from at least two precincts had signed off on the documents and submitted them to the main county elections office. “I know for certain that these additional names were added after,” Rosalyn Murphy, who served in November as an assistant poll manager at Church of the Redeemer in Sandy Springs, told the State Election Board during a hearing Thursday focusing on the performance of the county’s elections office. “That doesn’t even look like our handwriting.”

Georgia: Election report reveals disarray in lead up to November | Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Lackluster leadership and internal disarray caused Fulton County to mismanage last year’s presidential election, according to a report obtained exclusively by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The county’s Registration and Elections Office kept the document hidden from the public for the past month in what may have been a violation of the state’s open records law. After the elections board’s private attorneys refused to release it, Commission Chairman John Eaves obtained it and gave it to the AJC.

Georgia: Voting flaws in Fulton County | Hank Johnson/Atlanta Journal Constitution

Reports of serious errors occurring Election Day in electronic-voting machines in Fulton County demonstrate the urgency of passing legislation to verify the accuracy of our voting systems. Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp called Fulton County’s election administration a “debacle,” noting that this is yet another example of “the constant and systemic nature of election failures in Fulton County.” During this summer’s primary elections, several Fulton County precincts also reported a substantial disparity between registered voters and ballots. Voting-machine errors resulted in voter turnouts that exceeded 100 percent in some precincts. This figure is astronomical when compared to the statewide turnout that averaged between 10 and 20 percent. But one precinct had an impossible turnout of 23,300 percent. These kinds of problems with voting machines are precisely why I introduced H.R. 6246, the Verifying Official Totals for Elections (VOTE) Act. Not only does it improve our confidence in election data through transparency and accountability, more importantly, it assures accuracy.

Georgia: State probes Fulton elections errors  | ajc.com

Fulton County made an array of errors in the July 31 primary, putting voters in the wrong elections, declaring results to the state more than an hour late and producing data that doesn’t add up. Now state elections officials want to know whether Fulton performed poorly enough to throw off some of the final results, a spokesman for Secretary of State Brian Kemp confirmed. The state has launched an investigation into the county’s elections procedures. “I wouldn’t restrict it or limit it to any race at this point,” Kemp spokesman Jared Thomas said, declining to elaborate.

Georgia: Secretary of State criticizes Fulton County over vote counting progress, communication | The Republic

Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp said he is concerned about “numerous and substantial issues” surrounding Tuesday’s primary election in Fulton County and more concerned with a lack of communication with local voting officials. WSB-TV reports that Fulton County was scheduled to certify the results of Tuesday’s primary by noon Saturday. That deadline came and went. Now county election officials plan to meet Monday night.

Georgia: Computer communication issue caused a delay in Muscogee County GA election results | WRBL

Candidates in this year’s Primary Election were left waiting for results from 1,500 mail-in absentee ballots, well in to the early morning hours on Wednesday. Election officials blame a computer communication error for the delay. Absentee by mail ballots come from all over the county from folks who knew ahead of time they could not vote in person in the 2012 primary. To count them, they must be imported in to a computer using an optimal scan unit.  That computer is supposed to “talk” to another computer that then totals the results. When it became clear the machines weren’t communicating with each other, officials were forced to re-scan all 1,500 ballots.