Lawmakers work to shore up election security in Georgia

When someone in Georgia moves out of state or dies, the process to remove the person from the list of registered voters can take five years. In the meantime, someone else can pose as that voter and cast a fraudulent ballot—something former President Donald Trump claimed happened 5,000 times in the 2020 election.

The State Election Board investigated the claims and found a few family members in the state submitted mail-in ballots under a deceased relative’s name, but the majority of the 5,000 voters in question were still alive. But even just a few cases of fraud can shake voter confidence and affect future elections.

“Because of the behavior around the 2020 election and the lack of confidence, a lot of people believe that narrative that the election was stolen,” said Ken Cuccinelli, director of the Election Transparency Initiative. “Republicans lost both Senate seats in Georgia [in later elections] because people who didn’t believe their votes would matter stayed home. This stuff matters. It affects outcomes.”

The Georgia voter registry contains nearly 8 million names, and state lawmakers say it’s time to clean it up. Last month, the Republican-led state legislature passed a batch of bills related to election administration, one of which would change the requirements for removing people from voter rolls. Supporters of the bill, which Gov. Brian Kemp has not yet signed, say the changes are needed to improve voter confidence and participation in the 2024 presidential election. Opponents argue the changes will swamp election officials with meaningless checks to solve a problem that hasn’t materialized.

The Georgia legislation would enact other election security measures such as replacing QR codes on Dominion paper ballots with printed text, changing the threshold for candidates to get onto the ballot, and allowing the public to access digital scans of ballots after an election. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger supports the changes. He said the measure helps clarify rules for elections offices and defines what information they can use to remove inactive voters.

Under federal law, Georgia officials must first send postcards to voters at their registered addresses if they suspect the residents have moved or become inactive. If the voter does not cast a ballot in two subsequent federal general elections, they are booted from the voter roll. The entire process takes roughly five years.

“Every state struggles with dirty voter rolls,” Cuccinelli said. “Two percent of Americans move every month, but the process for removing them from voter rolls is so complicated and cumbersome that it never catches up to the actual population.”

That is why Georgia allows residents to challenge another voter’s registration. Election boards must review individual complaints, compare them to evidence, and determine whether there is probable cause to investigate. Then they notify the appropriate precinct and the voter involved and try to determine whether the person voted or registered correctly. Most challenges over the past four years have failed to cross the probable cause threshold. The latest bill spells out the types of evidence that could constitute probable cause. For example, anyone challenging a registration may include a death announcement or information from the National Change of Address list. Election offices may not use those as the only evidence. They can also use evidence of tax credits in another state, registration at a nonresidential address, and proof of death.

“It puts parameters around the challenge process,” Mike Hassinger, a spokesperson for Raffensperger, a Republican, said in a public statement. “Whereas before it was wide open, and there was no language. You could challenge a voter at any time for any reason.”

A ProPublica report found six conservative activists filed nearly 100,000 challenges in Georgia between 2021 and 2023. Of these, roughly 11,100 resulted in removal from the voter lists. A Texas-based organization called True the Vote challenged more than 364,000 voter statuses within a year of the 2020 election. In January, a judge ruled that True the Vote’s advocacy did not amount to voter intimidation, but he did rebuke the organization’s methods. He said their lists “utterly lacked reliability” and verged on recklessness.

In 2020 Georgia school teacher Joe Rossi used voter records to report that 4,000 Atlanta-area ballots were either duplicates or incorrectly cast. Kemp’s office and the State Election Board substantiated 36 of those and fined Fulton County for processing errors. The Heritage Foundation’s Election Fraud Database reports that only one election fraud case in Georgia resulted in a conviction in 2022, when a felon was convicted of casting a ballot using someone else’s name and forging a signature.

Cuccinelli said inaccurate voter rolls offer easy access to bad actors to cast illegal ballots in elections.

“We support clarity and standards,” Cuccinelli said. “No election office has the ability to continuously check their own voter rolls. So in the absence of that, states are completely reliant on citizen participants helping clean up the voter rolls, just as they’re reliant on citizen participants coming in and becoming election officials to execute the election itself because no election office has enough manpower to do that either.”

Opponents of the bill argue it changes too much too soon. The National Voter Registration Act shuts down registration challenges 90 days before an election, but the Georgia law would allow challenges up to 45 days before Election Day. The American Civil Liberties Union has promised to sue the state over the bill if Kemp signs it into law. Other opponents say the bill might boost transparency but also put a needless burden on election workers. David Becker runs the Center for Election Integrity and Research, a nonprofit that has funneled millions into training election directors nationwide.

“Challenges aren’t objectively good or bad. They can be effective,” Becker said. “When it’s less effective is when it’s not based on personal knowledge, when some kind of activist group sends you a spreadsheet and says, ‘Here are names that look similar, challenge all of them.’ It can overwhelm election offices when they’re most busy and can often shift the burden to eligible voters based on pretty shoddy data about whether they’re eligible.”

Georgia participates in the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), a nonprofit that shares data among 25 states and the District of Columbia to keep voter rolls accurate. The state also automatically sends updates to the election office when voters change their address on file with the department of motor vehicles. New applicants for state IDs and driver’s licenses are automatically signed up to vote, which boosted registration in 2020 to 98 percent of the state’s eligible population. Another election bill passed in 2022, requires photo ID to register and to cast ballots.

“Georgia is a model for accurate voter lists,” said Becker, who helped develop ERIC. “Those who might argue that voting in Georgia is hard or that voter fraud is rampant or that elections are rigged, they’re wrong. You can’t get much more scrutiny than what Georgia went through in 2020, and they passed that test with flying colors.”

Trey Hood, a professor of political science at the University of Georgia, said the majority of Georgia Republicans still believe the 2020 election was stolen from former President Donald Trump. That election came down to weeks of waiting on results from Georgia, where Biden eventually won by a margin of less than 1 percent in a recount. Later audits affirmed the final totals. Hood said the latest bills address perceived fraud rather than verifiable issues.

“Most of these large-scale challenges don’t really go anywhere,” Hood told WORLD. “It’s really about increasing voter confidence as opposed to dealing with a problem that’s actually there. For example, there’s no mechanical reason to remove the QR codes. They seem to be working properly, with no reported issues. But we’re going to be removing the QR codes simply because it’s less transparent to the voter in terms of what they can see.”