Georgia GOP has challenged 65,000 voter registrations this year: analysis

One of the most significant reasons gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams is encouraging Georgians to vote early is that Republicans are doing everything they can to disrupt this election, aka stop Democrats from being able to vote.

This year, Republicans have attempted to purge thousands upon thousands of voter registrations, all in the name of alleged voter fraud. They’re using SB 202, a bill signed into law by Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp after the loss of former President Donald Trump in 2020, to “police Georgia’s voter list,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution's (AJC) Mark Niesse writes.

Nsé Ufot, chief executive of the New Georgia Project Action Fund, told The Guardian, “There’s no doubt that the senate bill 202 push, much like the January 6 insurrection, was a response to the sort of multiracial rising American electorate. Full stop … I see a straight line between those two dots. No curve.”

In early October, the Gwinnett County Board of Elections voted to dismiss all voter registration challenges filed by Republicans—22,000 that were alleged to be invalid. Gwinnett is a suburb of Atlanta with a 58.4% Democratic voting block.

The terrifying thing is that Gwinnett is just one county in Georgia where election officials are being forced to contend with voter registration purging issues. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports 15,000 challenges made in Forsyth and 1,350 in Cobb County just this month. This year, about 65,000 challenges were filed, with about 3,000 upheld, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports.

The challenges have been filed mainly by VoterGA, a group that receives its backing from The America Project, a group founded by Michael Flynn and Patrick Byrne, founder of Overstock—both of whom have consistently refuted Trump’s legitimate loss to Biden.

According to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 63% of Cobb County, Georgia, challenges to voter registration were fixed on people of color whose applications lacked apartment numbers or had listed their addresses as Kennesaw State University.

“Death by a thousand cuts is how I’m thinking about it now,” Ufot said. “This is really like playing Whac-a-Mole at a time where we don’t have the resources to fight back this kind of voter suppression,” Ufot told The Guardian.

Vasu Abhiraman of the American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that “Local elections officials should be devoting their precious resources to ensuring voters can register, access the ballot and have their ballots counted … These mass voter challenges are designed to disenfranchise, and we will continue to demand they be swiftly dismissed under the law.”