GEORGIA: Court Says State Can Purge 309K Voters

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports:

About 309,000 names were set to be erased from Georgia’s list of registered voters Monday night, a mass cancellation that a federal judge allowed to move forward. By Tuesday morning, the number of registered voters in Georgia was set to shrink from 7.4 million to 7.1 million.

A voting rights group, Fair Fight Action, said in federal court Monday that the registration cancellations target roughly 120,000 inactive voters who would otherwise be eligible to participate in elections but are being removed because they haven’t cast a ballot since at least 2012.

The conservative National Review reports:

An emergency motion to stop the voter purge was filed Tuesday by Fair Fight Action, a voting rights advocacy group founded by failed Democratic gubernatorial Stacey Abrams, who blamed her loss on voter suppression.

“Georgians should not lose their right to vote simply because they have not expressed that right in recent elections,” said the group’s CEO, Lauren Groh-Wargo. “Georgia’s practice of removing voters who have declined to participate in recent elections violates the United States Constitution.”

Georgia’s voter registration laws are some of the more stringent in the country, known as “use it or lose it.” Governor Brian Kemp, Georgia’s secretary of state during the 2018 midterms when he was running against Abrams for governor, also enforced one of the strictest voter ID laws in the country during the governor’s race.