In Savannah, Georgia, nearly half a million people may be removed from the voter roll due to a comprehensive audit of the state’s voter registration list.
The office of Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger is dispatching notification letters to 477,883 voters who were marked as inactive for the 2022 and 2024 general elections, urging them to reply within 40 days.
If recipients don’t update their status within the allotted time, they will no longer be able to vote without re-registering.
James Hall, a Republican member of the Chatham County Board of Elections, explained, “Notifications are being sent out to inform you that your voter registration is inactive. You are encouraged to respond via the Secretary of State’s website to confirm, ‘Hey, I’m still here.'”
Under Georgia law, a registered voter becomes inactive if they’ve had no contact with their elections office for five or more years, for any reason.
- Almost 500,000 voters to be purged from GA voter list
- Reverend at St. Benedict the Moor Catholic Church appointed to serve in New York
- HHI residents gather to honor longtime athletic director
- Storm Team 3: A drier pattern sets up for Tuesday
- Lightning struck-apartment building condemned
“If you have these loose ends because someone moved or someone died or what not, you have the opportunity for voter fraud or misrepresentation or other activities that would skew our election results,” Hall said. “How many voting machines do we need to put in one polling location? Do we need 5 polling locations or 7 locations in pooler vs 5 or 7 locations in garden city? One of the ways we make those calculations effectively is we measure the number of voters that live there.”
Though, some voting rights advocates told the audit could cause eligible voters to lose their status.
“You can make mistakes. We even had two super voters here who are staff members at Fair Fight. They vote in every election who received letters that they may be marked inactive,” Voter Protection Director at Fair Fight Action, Janetta Cureton, Ph.D. said. “Sometimes some individuals will receive these notices and then realize too late that there’s an issue or a problem and will be inappropriately removed.”
If you receive a letter saying you have been marked inactive or that you’re at risk of losing your registration, you can submit a status update on the Secretary of State’s website or through your state’s online voter registration to stay on the rolls.
