{"id":27383,"date":"2023-07-15T11:51:44","date_gmt":"2023-07-15T18:51:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/?p=27383"},"modified":"2023-07-15T12:48:57","modified_gmt":"2023-07-15T19:48:57","slug":"close-to-100000-voter-registrations-were-challenged-in-georgia-almost-all-by-just-six-right-wing-activists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/2023\/07\/15\/close-to-100000-voter-registrations-were-challenged-in-georgia-almost-all-by-just-six-right-wing-activists\/","title":{"rendered":"Close to 100,000 Voter Registrations Were Challenged in Georgia \u2014 Almost All by Just Six Right-Wing Activists"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Chris Ramsey, of Palmetto, Georgia, was one of nearly 100,000 voters whose registration was challenged.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Politics<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

by Doug Bock Clark<\/a>, photography by Cheney Orr for ProPublica<\/a><\/strong>July 13, 7 a.m. EDT<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The recent transformation of the state\u2019s election laws explicitly enabled citizens to file unlimited challenges to other voters\u2019 registrations. Experts warn that election officials\u2019 handling of some of those challenges may clash with federal law.<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches<\/a>, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On March 15, 2022, an email appeared in the inbox of the election director of Forsyth County, Georgia, with the subject line \u201cChallenge of Elector\u2019s Eligibility.\u201d A spreadsheet attached to the email identified 13 people allegedly registered to vote at P.O. boxes in Forsyth County, a wealthy Republican suburb north of Atlanta. Georgians are supposed to register at residential addresses, except in special circumstances. \u201cPlease consider this my request that a hearing be held to determine these voters\u2019 eligibility to vote,\u201d wrote the challenger, Frank Schneider.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Schneider is a former chief financial officer at multiple companies, including Jockey International, the underwear maker. His Instagram page includes pictures of him golfing at exclusive resorts and a dog peeing on a mailbox with the caption \u201cWoody suspects mail-in voter fraud\u201d and the hashtag \u201c#maga.\u201d On Truth Social, the social media platform backed by former president Donald Trump, Schneider\u2019s posts have questioned the 2020 election results in Forsyth County and spread content related to QAnon, the conspiracy theory that holds that the Democratic elite are cannibalistic pedophiles. In January 2023, he posted an open letter to his U.S. representative-elect encouraging \u201chearings to hold perpetrators accountable where evidence exists that election fraud took place in the 2020 and 2022 elections.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The March 2022 voter challenges were the first of many from Schneider: As the year progressed, he submitted seven more batches of challenges, each one larger than the one previous, growing from 507 voters in April to nearly 15,800 in October, for a total of over 31,500 challenges.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Vetting Georgia\u2019s voter rolls was once largely the domain of nonpartisan elections officials. But after the 2020 election, a change in the law enabled Schneider and other activists to take on a greater role. Senate Bill 202, which the state\u2019s Republican-controlled legislature passed in 2021, transformed election laws in response to \u201cmany electors concerned about allegations of rampant voter fraud,\u201d as the bill stated. Many states allow challenges, but officials in Georgia and experts say that in the past challengers have typically had relevant personal knowledge, such as someone submitting a challenge to remove a dead relative from the rolls. Georgia, however, is unusual in explicitly allowing citizens unlimited challenges against anyone in their county.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At first, voting rights groups were vocal about other aspects of SB 202, such as restrictions on absentee ballots, paying less attention to the 98-page bill\u2019s handful of sentence-length tweaks that addressed voter challenges. The change to the challenges rule was \u201cthe sleeper element of SB 202,\u201d said Rahul Garabadu, a senior voting rights attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Media outlets have reported on the high number of challenges<\/a> and numerous cases of voters feeling harassed, impeded or intimidated<\/a> by being placed into \u201cchallenged\u201d status. But the outsized role of the small group of people making the challenges was less clear. ProPublica was able to determine that a vast majority of the challenges since SB 202 became law \u2014 about 89,000 of 100,000 \u2014 were submitted by just six right-wing activists, including Schneider. Another 12 people accounted for most of the rest. (ProPublica obtained data for all challenges logged in 30 of the state\u2019s 159 counties, including the 20 most populous.) Of those challenges, roughly 11,100 were successful \u2014 at least 2,350 voters were removed from the rolls and at least 8,700 were placed in a \u201cchallenged\u201d or equivalent status, which can force people to vote with a provisional ballot that election officials later adjudicate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Gwinnett County elections supervisor Zach Manifold looks over boxes of voter challenges on Sept. 15, in Lawrenceville, Georgia. Credit:John Bazemore\/AP Photo<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Challenges from right-wing activists have proliferated in Georgia despite strict federal laws governing how voters can be removed from rolls. That\u2019s in part because state and local election officials have struggled to figure out how to reconcile SB 202 with federal protections. This has resulted in counties handling challenges inconsistently, sometimes in ways that experts warn may have violated federal law, something they say may have been the case with Schneider\u2019s March challenges.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the run-up to the 2022 election, voting rights advocates warned that some challenges might create insurmountable barriers to people casting a ballot, such as by removing them from the rolls. But there were no published accounts of Georgians who ultimately did not cast a ballot as a result of being challenged. Schneider\u2019s March challenges did lead to this kind of harm in at least one instance: An unhoused voter found his removal from the rolls too high a barrier to allow him to re-register in time to vote.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Schneider would not agree to an interview and did not respond directly to ProPublica\u2019s written questions. In emails, he stated that challenges \u201conly are acted upon\u201d if the elections board approves them and wrote, \u201cI have not been made aware of anyone that couldn\u2019t vote based on anything submitted, if true.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even some voters who managed to remain on the rolls were still forced by challenges to fight to remain registered. In Fulton County, which encompasses most of Atlanta, an immunosuppressed cancer patient had to drive nearly two hours round-trip to a crowded hearing to defend his right to vote. At the same proceeding, a Black woman likened her challenge to voter intimidation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThere is a clear imbalance of power between the individual bringing the challenges and the county and voters,\u201d said Esosa Osa, the deputy executive director of Fair Fight Action, a voting rights advocacy organization. Elections officials and voters, she said, \u201ccurrently have very little recourse once challenged, regardless of the merits of the challenge.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some activists have justified their efforts by claiming that people might exploit flaws in the voter rolls to commit fraud \u2014 for example, by voting under the name of a deceased person still on the rolls. Officials in multiple counties told ProPublica that they did not know of any instances of challenges resulting in a successfully prosecuted case of voter fraud. A spokesperson for the Georgia secretary of state\u2019s office said it does not track this data.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

ProPublica did find that challenges sometimes identified errors in the voter rolls, which are dauntingly complex databases that are forever evolving as people register, move, die or otherwise change their statuses. Many of these corrections would have happened anyway in the routine maintenance process, officials said and records showed, though sometimes at a pace slower than if activists submitted challenges.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIf all these challengers are finding is inconsequential errors that do not affect election results on the whole, but they\u2019re placing real and harmful burdens on voters, then you have to wonder why they\u2019re really doing this,\u201d said Derek Clinger, a senior staff attorney with the State Democracy Research Initiative at the University of Wisconsin Law School. \u201cIt\u2019s doing more harm than good.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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In 2018, Joseph Riggs, a longtime Forsyth County resident who identifies as a Democrat, became homeless after struggling with depression and other mental health challenges and began using a P.O. box as his permanent mailing address during what would be years of instability. Still, he made sure to vote in the 2020 presidential election and wanted to vote in the hotly contested 2022 Georgia senate race because he viewed its outcome as affecting social policy that would impact him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But that spring Riggs received at his P.O. box a two-page letter from the Forsyth County elections office informing him of Schneider\u2019s March challenge and asking him either to appear at a board hearing at 9 a.m. on a workday in June or to send in paperwork justifying his registration at a P.O. box, changing his registration or removing himself from the rolls. Around the time of the hearing, Riggs was living in a tent in the woods, within walking distance of the part-time jobs he was juggling at McDonald\u2019s, Dollar Tree and a gas station. He worried that attending the hearing would require an expensive Uber ride and force him to take unpaid time off work. In the months beforehand, a state election official had also called Riggs to question him about his registration, he said, making him think fearfully of news reports of people being arrested for violating voting laws<\/a>. And he said he did not remember seeing the option to send in paperwork. Ultimately, he did not contest his removal from the rolls.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Riggs said that after the county elections board removed him, he doubted that he could re-register because the letter and phone call led him to believe he now had no valid address. (According to the secretary of state\u2019s office, unhoused individuals can solve this challenge by giving a residential address that is the \u201cclosest approximation\u201d of the location they shelter at, such as a street corner, and then listing a separate mailing address, such as P.O. box. But Riggs was not provided with this information.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI was really angry,\u201d he said. \u201cWhen you\u2019re homeless, your vote is the only voice you\u2019ve got.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Barbara Helm, who identifies as a Democrat, said she did not see the letter in her P.O. box notifying her of Schneider\u2019s March 2022 challenge against her, as she had been struggling with addiction and homelessness. Nor did she know at first that she had been removed at the same June hearing as Riggs was called to, though election workers sent her another letter announcing her removal. It wasn\u2019t until she contacted election officials during the in-person early voting period in October that she learned that she\u2019d been removed from the rolls and that the window to re-register had closed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cA lot of people have fought and died for voting rights,\u201d said Helm. \u201cI didn\u2019t even know\u201d the challengers and board \u201ccould do that to you.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Barbara Helm, who lives in Toccoa, Georgia, said she did not see the letter in her P.O. box notifying her of the challenge to her voter registration.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Helm contacted the local Democratic Party about her plight, and its officials took up her case \u2014 she was mentioned as an example of voter suppression by Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams in a debate, though not by name, and her voting difficulties<\/a> were covered in several news reports. Helm was eventually allowed to vote with a provisional ballot, which she believed only happened because of the attention to her case. (A lawyer for the Forsyth County board, Karen Pachuta, wrote to ProPublica that \u201cthe receipt of a provisional ballot in Forsyth County is not dependent on any particular person or circumstance receiving media or political attention.\u201d)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A week after the election, Helm showed up to a board meeting to defend her provisional ballot and beg for her vote to count. \u201cIt kind of brought tears to my eyes when they approved my ballot,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Two other voters challenged by Schneider in March 2022 returned residency affirmations, obtained by ProPublica through records requests, in which they explained that they traveled throughout the year as engineers on projects around the nation and used the P.O. box as their residency address in lieu of a permanent one. The board rejected the challenges, allowing them to maintain their prior registrations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of Schneider\u2019s initial thirteen challenges from March 2022, eleven were heard at the hearing that June, with the county election board upholding five and dismissing six.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the lead-up to the 2022 election, the Forsyth County board ruled on about 31,500 challenges from Schneider and another 1,100 from two other challengers. In total, the board approved over 200 of the most serious type of challenge that immediately removes a voter from the rolls, known as \u201c229s\u201d for their section of Georgia code. The board also approved around 900 \u201c230\u201d challenges, which place voters into \u201cchallenged\u201d status.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of the 30 counties for which ProPublica reviewed voter challenges, Forsyth County was the most aggressive in approving them \u2014 in ways that voting rights lawyers warned may violate the National Voter Registration Act, a federal law regulating how voters can be removed from voting rolls.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Joel Natt, the Republican vice chair of the board, sought to approve Schneider\u2019s challenges against Helm and Riggs at the June 2022 hearing, Democratic board member Anita Tucker asked, \u201cMadam Chair and Legal, does that violate the NVRA?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tucker expressed a number of concerns, according to an audio recording of the hearing obtained through open records requests. The concerns centered on whether the removals of Helm and Riggs violated the NVRA\u2019s prohibition against removing voters in a systematic manner in the 90 days before a federal election.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the hearing, Tucker argued that rather than immediately removing Helm and Riggs, \u201cthe best right procedure\u201d was the NVRA\u2019s process for voters whose residency is in doubt, which allows voters to remain on the rolls for around four years and protects them against being unable to re-register in time to vote. Tucker also questioned whether the batches of challenges \u2014 which had grown to encompass hundreds or thousands of voters, along with PDFs of alleged evidence of their ineligibility to vote, such as documents matching names to addresses outside the county \u2014 qualified as systematic challenges, and therefore shouldn\u2019t have been allowed to proceed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In response to Tucker\u2019s questions, Pachuta, the board\u2019s lawyer, warned, \u201cThere\u2019s not clear case law on that. It could very well end up in litigation.\u201d The lawyer explained that \u201cthere\u2019s different opinions\u201d on whether the challenges would fall under state code or the NVRA. She then advised that \u201cbecause it is so close to the election, you have to review these items on an individualized basis.\u201d (The NVRA allows consideration of individualized challenges during the 90-day protected window.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Natt had originally motioned to remove Helm, Riggs and another voter as a block, until the lawyer advised that this could be construed as systematically processing a mass challenge. So Natt and the conservative board chair, Barbara Luth, reintroduced them one by one. Then the conservative board members outvoted Tucker to remove them from the rolls. Recordings show that the majority continued outvoting the Democratic minority while approving challenges one by one during many meetings. The board did summarily dismiss around 28,500 challenges, all from Schneider, because they were made using a fallible database-matching technique comparing Georgia voter rolls with the National Change of Address system, which a federal court had disallowed<\/a> as systematic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI want to be clear that breaking down the challenges\u201d to do them one by one \u201cis still systematic and likely violating the NVRA,\u201d said Andrew Garber, a counsel for the Brennan Center for Justice\u2019s Voting Rights and Elections Program, who had concerns with the quality of evidence presented and the depth of evaluation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe Forsyth board certainly violated the spirit of the NVRA and likely its letter as well,\u201d said Garabadu, the attorney with the ACLU of Georgia, which sent a letter to the board<\/a> warning that its decision at a September meeting to remove voters within the 90-day window \u201cwas made in violation of state and federal law and we urge you to reverse it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pachuta wrote to ProPublica that \u201cI respectfully disagree with the suggestion that considering challenges \u2018one by one\u2019 is a violation of the NVRA. Rather, I believe established authority provides that the NVRA allows removals based on individualized information<\/em> at any time.\u201d She noted that the board spent \u201chours during its meetings conducting individualized reviews of various data sets to make the best collective decision(s) it could.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After a ProPublica reporter described Riggs\u2019 experience, Luth, the board chair, said that in the future the board might refrain from removing voters from the registration rolls within the 90-day window and just put voters under a challenged status, though she emphasized it would remain a case-by-case decision. \u201cThat\u2019s better than taking them off the rolls,\u201d she said. \u201cThat would be where my vote would go.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Natt, who had argued forcefully at the hearing to remove Helm and Riggs from the rolls, called the removals \u201ca mistake\u201d and said, \u201cWe learned from it.\u201d He expressed remorse to ProPublica over their difficulties voting. \u201cI don\u2019t want voters to feel burdened,\u201d he said. \u201cIt pained me personally.\u201d He emphasized that the board had been operating with limited guidance from state election officials and that they had no legal choice but to rule on the challenges. \u201cWe have to respect the challenger,\u201d said Natt, and \u201cwe have to respect the challengee.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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South of the conservative, wealthy suburbs of Forsyth County, in the county that encompasses the liberal center of Atlanta, challenges were handled differently by the left-leaning elections board \u2014 but still caused problems for election officials and voters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By the time Chris Ramsey received a letter requesting him to appear before the Fulton County board and \u201cdefend why the challenge to your right to vote should not be sustained,\u201d he was six months into a cancer treatment that had suppressed his immune system. On his doctor\u2019s advice, he had stopped teaching elementary school and had people bring him groceries rather than risk interacting with crowds. But Ramsey felt he had to defend his right to vote. So on a Thursday morning in March 2023, he braved rush-hour traffic from his home on the outskirts of Atlanta to downtown, drove in circles looking for parking, paid $20, trudged three blocks to the meeting and arrived \u201cextremely exhausted,\u201d he recalled. Still, he was angry enough to wait nearly two hours so that he could get his turn at the microphone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Chris Ramsey was six months into cancer treatment that had suppressed his immune system when he received a letter requesting that he appear before the Fulton County elections board to defend his voter registration.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI\u2019m sorry, excuse my voice, I\u2019m battling cancer,\u201d he said hoarsely. He then proceeded to criticize the Fulton board for summoning him over a clerical error in his address that he\u2019d previously tried to fix. But once he more fully understood that the board had just been following the law that the challenger had invoked, he suspected the challenger of having political motives. Ramsey, who identifies as a Democrat, told ProPublica, \u201cI felt that it was a conservative person trying to make it easier for their politician to get where they need to be.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ramsey had been challenged by Jason Frazier, a member of the planning commission for the city of Roswell and urban farmer, who has filed almost 10,000 voter challenges in Fulton County. On a conservative podcast, Frazier described introducing other activists outside of Fulton County to the basics of voter roll analysis. He is also a prominent participant in frequent private conference calls about policing voter rolls hosted by the Election Integrity Network, a conservative organization focused on transforming election laws. During several calls, Frazier gave advice to more than 100 activists from at least 15 states, according to minutes provided by the watchdog group Documented.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Jason Frazier, a member of the planning commission for the city of Roswell and urban farmer, challenged Chris Ramsey\u2019s vote and has filed almost 10,000 voter challenges in Fulton County.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The vast majority of the challenges handled in the March hearing that Ramsey attended had been submitted by Frazier, who had challenged about 1,000 people registered at nonresidential addresses, such as P.O. boxes or businesses, and another 4,000 people who he claimed lived at invalid addresses (including one member of the county elections board), most because they had the wrong directional component at the end of their street name \u2014 e.g., \u201cSE\u201d instead of \u201cNE.\u201d About a dozen people at the three-hour hearing spoke out against the challengers and Fulton officials\u2019 handling of the challenge process. A woman who introduced herself as a survivor of domestic violence explained her use of a P.O. box as part of her \u201cextraordinary lengths to try to protect myself and not keep my address public.\u201d A mother complained about how addressing the challenge was taking her away from caring for her children.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI don\u2019t appreciate being collateral damage in this mission to clean up the voter rolls,\u201d Sara Ketchum said to the board. Ketchum, who is Black and identifies as liberal, had temporarily moved for work from Atlanta to Washington, D.C., where she registered for a mailing address, but then returned to Georgia in time to vote. That D.C. mailing address became the basis for the challenge against her, submitted not by Frazier but by another prolific challenger. According to Georgia law, many people, such as university students, military personnel and traveling workers, may be legally registered to vote in one place but have a temporary mailing address while living in another.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Sara Ketchum, who lives in Atlanta, says a temporary move to Washington, D.C., became the basis for the challenge against her.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Ketchum told ProPublica that she felt the challenge was a type of intimidation, given Georgia\u2019s history of white citizens using voter challenges to suppress the Black vote<\/a>. \u201cIt put in perspective that voter suppression is real and it\u2019s actually happening,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the meeting, Frazier defended his challenges. \u201cI\u2019m free labor trying to help the system to make sure everyone can vote,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019m not trying to suppress anyone. I just want clean voter rolls for a multitude of reasons,\u201d including to make sure absentee ballots go to the right address. He insisted that challenges needed to be processed in a way that \u201cdoesn\u2019t hassle anyone\u201d and blamed election officials for not making it clear that people could have responded to the challenges in ways that did not include coming to the hearing in person.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Frazier did not respond to requests for comment or to a list of detailed questions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Frazier himself was challenged in 2022 for being registered to vote at a business address \u2014 he sells vegetables from his farm at his house \u2014 he decried it as a \u201cfrivolous retaliatory challenge\u201d from someone he himself had challenged. The Fulton board did not approve the challenge against Frazier.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Recently, Fulton\u2019s Republican Party has twice nominated Frazier to become a member of the county board of elections, which would give him oversight of its employees and data. But each time the county commission voted to reject him, with one commissioner criticizing him for undermining confidence<\/a> in the election\u2019s office\u2019s work and calling him \u201cnot a serious nomination.\u201d At the end of June, the county GOP sued the board of commissioners<\/a>, seeking to have a judge force the commissioners to appoint Frazier to the elections board.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A person speaks in support of Republican elections board nominee Jason Frazier during the public comment portion of the Fulton County Board of Commissioners meeting in June. The board rejected the nomination of Frazier, who has challenged the registrations of nearly 10,000 voters in Fulton County, the largest base of Democratic voters in Georgia.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

A ProPublica analysis suggests that Frazier disproportionately challenged Democrats. Georgia election data does not track party affiliation, so officials use primary voting histories as a proxy. Of the roughly 8,000 challenges by Frazier that ProPublica obtained, about 800 voters had most recently voted in a Fulton County primary. Of those, 78% voted in the Democratic race, compared to 67% of voters across the county. Several other challengers in Fulton County, including the person who filed the challenge against Ketchum, challenged more than 90% Democratic primary voters. (In Forsyth County, the challenges submitted by Schneider show a smaller disparity: 28% Democratic primary voters, relative to 22% for the county as a whole.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Five of the six most prolific challengers identified by ProPublica, including Frazier, have assisted or been assisted by right-wing organizations, some leaders of which were involved in efforts to challenge the results of the 2020 presidential election.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Frazier has been a prominent participant in frequent private conference calls hosted by the Election Integrity Network, dispensing advice about how to police voter rolls to more than a hundred activists from Georgia and other states. In Gwinnett County, a trio of challengers associated with VoterGA, an organization with a stated mission of \u201cworking to restore election integrity,\u201d needed dollies to wheel eight cardboard boxes loaded with tens of thousands of affidavits into the election office. Another Gwinnett County challenger targeted about 10,500 registrations using data provided by Look Ahead America, a conservative organization that offered data and guides for a \u201cBallot Challenge Program\u201d in battleground states.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In response to questions, Look Ahead America released a statement<\/a> describing how it \u201cprovided thousands of volunteers across ten states\u201d with guidance on how to properly submit voter challenges. It also described itself as \u201ca nonpartisan, nonprofit foundation.\u201d Garland Favorito, the co-founder of VoterGA, did not answer ProPublica\u2019s questions about Georgians working with the organization on their challenges and its leadership\u2019s involvement in disputing the 2020 presidential election results. When pressed for comment, he only responded, \u201cYes it is a provably false blatant lie.\u201d He declined to elaborate. The Election Integrity Network did not respond to detailed questions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fulton County removed the most voters from its rolls of any county that ProPublica examined \u2014 roughly 1,700 \u2014 but did so mostly during the first half of 2022 when the challenges began, before switching course. Cathy Woolard, the board chair at the time, explained to ProPublica that it had made the removals while taking advice from a county lawyer and that removals were \u201ccompliant with the law.\u201d After hiring a special counsel with more experience, however, the board switched to placing voters in \u201cchallenged\u201d status rather than removing them, in order to \u201cminimally impact the voter\u201d during the 90-day protected window. (The challenges were then resolved after the election.) If Forsyth County\u2019s board had handled challenges in this way, Helm and Riggs would not have had their difficulties voting. \u201cFulton County\u2019s objective is to make certain that anyone who is able to vote gets an opportunity to vote,\u201d said Patrise Perkins-Hooker, the special counsel who became board chair on July 1. \u201cWe prioritized the right to vote for each of our citizens and protected that through the challenge process.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nadine Williams, the elections director for Fulton County, said in an email to ProPublica that the challenges had \u201csignificantly\u201d impacted her workers \u201cdue to the short turnaround time to complete the challenge process.\u201d (SB 202 requires that challenges that place voters in \u201cchallenged status\u201d be considered \u201cimmediately\u201d by the board and that hearings for challenges that remove people from the rolls be held within roughly a month of being filed.) Officials from multiple counties described processing the challenges as not just time consuming but also expensive, due to the extra demands on staff and the need to hold additional public hearings and send thousands of mailers, plus hire lawyers and technology consultants.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIf this was actually fixing something or finding criminal activity, it might be worth it. But it\u2019s harassing other citizens, distracting us from important work and not achieving the desired result,\u201d Woolard said. Challenges, she said, have \u201csupplanted our priorities with the priorities of a very small group of people who did these challenges.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Despite requests from some counties for clearer direction, state officials have issued limited guidance<\/a> for how counties should handle challenges, mostly advising them to rely on their attorneys.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Zach Manifold, the head of elections for Gwinnett County, said that \u201ccounties are out there on their own trying to figure out\u201d the potential discrepancies between state and federal law regarding voter challenges. Gwinnett is Georgia\u2019s second most populous county and had the most challenges of any of the 30 counties ProPublica examined. Almost all of them were dismissed for inadequate evidence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The lack of direction, the overwhelming volume of challenges and the complicated intersection between SB 202 and the National Voter Registration Act have resulted in boards handling challenges in divergent ways and with different impacts on voters \u2014 as evidenced by Forsyth and Fulton counties.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Among Georgia election officials, a sense has been growing that something needs to be done about the challenges. About a week before the 2022 election, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said that \u201cwe need some reform\u201d on the challenge provision to \u201ctighten that up\u201d due to impacts on election officials, and he suggested that the legislature could change the law in 2023. (In the subsequent session, the Georgia legislature enacted no such measure, though it did pass another election-related bill<\/a>.) In the February meeting<\/a> of the State Elections Board, which can issue rules for interpreting election law, its chair, William Duffey, briefly noted that \u201cwe have already identified\u201d challenges \u201cas an issue that we need to address,\u201d after a voting rights advocate raised concerns<\/a> about how they were being handled disparately.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIf you have two different counties handling\u201d analogous \u201cchallenges differently, we have an issue,\u201d Edward Lindsey, a Republican member of Georgia\u2019s State Election Board, told ProPublica, emphasizing that county and state election boards need to work together to solve the problem. \u201cIt\u2019s incumbent on us to have a consistent system in determining who is and isn\u2019t eligible to vote. That needs to be consistent across 159 counties.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When ProPublica asked the secretary of state\u2019s office about the inconsistent ways in which counties were handling the challenges, Mike Hassinger, a spokesperson, said: \u201cWe\u2019re going to try to get the State Elections Board to issue guidance of some kind to answer all these questions that you have.\u201d He said that county elections board members, who receive a small stipend for their part-time work, \u201care having to make these decisions affecting people\u2019s franchise\u201d and that the secretary of state\u2019s office was going to encourage the state board to \u201cgive them some rules to go by.\u201dLawmakers Reintroduce Bill to Battle Nation\u2019s Stillbirth Crisis<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Asked if the inconsistencies ProPublica identified had led to internal discussions about how to update guidance around challenges, Hassinger answered, \u201cOh, hell yeah. Absolutely.\u201d The secretary of state\u2019s office subsequently issued a statement to ProPublica saying that the office had already been working on creating \u201cuniform standards for voter challenges,\u201d adding, \u201cIt is not ProPublica\u2019s findings that prompted us to do so.\u201d In another statement, the office said that it is \u201cthankful\u201d for \u201cProPublica\u2019s additional information, and have asked the state election board to provide rules.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Duffey, the chair of the State Election Board, said that he had not received recommendations regarding new rules from the secretary of state\u2019s office and that he had been independently drafting a memorandum that would provide \u201can analytical process\u201d to allow counties to discern if a challenge should be considered under state or federal law. He explained that past news coverage of voter challenges and complaints from election officials prompted him to ask himself during the 2022 election: \u201cHow can a county deal with that? And the fact is, they can\u2019t. There was nobody out there that was trying to help them make the determination of how they ought to process these.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He went on to say: \u201cAs a practical matter, they probably didn’t have enough time to do it differently. But we do now. And now that the election is over, we intend to do that.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Politics by Doug Bock Clark, photography by Cheney Orr for ProPublicaJuly 13, 7 a.m. EDT The recent transformation of the state\u2019s election laws explicitly enabled citizens to file unlimited challenges to other voters\u2019 registrations. Experts warn that election officials\u2019 handling of some of those challenges may clash with federal law. ProPublica is a nonprofit… Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[797],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27383"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27383"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27383\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27389,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27383\/revisions\/27389"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27383"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27383"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27383"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}