ATLANTA – From Georgia's mountains to its Atlantic shore, challenges to the qualifications of voters have rolled in this summer and fall, part of a wide-ranging national effort coordinated by Donald Trump’s allies to enlist Republican activists to remove people they view as suspect from the voting rolls.
Thus far, barely 1% of people called into question have been removed from the rolls or placed into challenged status, mostly because counties are disregarding challenges. But those who allege Georgia's voting rolls are bloated with ineligible voters are trying to change that, filing lawsuits and pushing the Trump-aligned State Election Board to order counties to do more.
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The Associated Press finds more than 63,000 Georgians have been challenged since July 1, when a law that could make it easier to uphold challenges partially took effect. The AP's survey covered Georgia's 39 most populous counties, as well as six other counties with challenge activity. That’s a big surge from 2023 and the first half of 2024, when the AP found that about 18,000 voters were challenged.
And efforts are spreading geographically. They had been concentrated in majority-Democratic counties in metro Atlanta. But since July 1, 100 or more voters have been challenged in at least 20 counties statewide, including some heavily Republican areas.
As the AP found earlier, county election officials continue rejecting the vast majority of challenges. Fewer than 800 voters since July 1 — mostly in the suburban Atlanta Republican stronghold of Forsyth County — have been removed from the rolls or placed in challenged status. Voters in challenged status can cast ballots if they prove their residence, but counties are supposed to consider removing them next year if they don't vote.
The effort to remove voters has drawn scrutiny from the U.S. Justice Department, which in September issued a seven-page guidance memo that aims to limit challenges and block parts of the new Georgia law by citing 1993’s National Voter Registration Act.
Most of the targeted voters appear to have moved away from their listed addresses, and activists argue letting them stay registered invites fraud. Challengers have been aided by tools which rely on change-of-address lists and other documents to help identify people who could be wrongly registered.
“When ineligible voters remain on the voter rolls, it increases the likelihood of those persons voting in our county, which dilutes the legitimate votes of our citizens,” said Marci McCarthy, chair of the DeKalb County Republican Party, which sued its county board of elections this month alleging it was failing to hear challenges. “And every vote by an ineligible voter robs us as citizens of our vote.”
A room full of angry voters
Often, when counties send letters to challenged voters, no one appears at a hearing to defend their eligibility. But in the Savannah suburb of Bryan County on Oct. 10, a room full of angry voters applauded as the county board dismissed challenges because the person who filed them didn't appear for a hearing.
“I’m frustrated with this entire process, that we all had to be here today," Michael Smith said at the hearing. "I’m frustrated that our state passed a poorly thought-out law that required and allowed somebody to do this to all of us.”
Many Democrats and liberal voting rights activists argue Republicans are challenging voters either to remove Democrats or to sow doubt about the accuracy of elections in advance of 2024 presidential voting. The voter challenge movement stems from fears that long existed about illegal voting but grew to dominate the Republican Party after Trump’s unsupported claims of voter fraud led many to believe Joe Biden didn’t win Georgia in 2020.
“We are amplifying lies and misunderstandings, fundamental misunderstandings, of how election law works,” state Rep. Saira Draper of Atlanta, who was the state Democratic Party’s director of voter protection in 2020, told the State Election Board on Oct. 8.
Opponents say disqualification efforts rest on faulty foundations. They say voters who change their mailing addresses haven't necessarily changed their residences and that some information challengers use is outdated. Particularly under fire are voter challenge tools including EagleAI and True the Vote’s IV3.
“EagleAI is a third-party program that scrapes the internet that was reviewed by county election offices as being worse than the programs that they have already,” Draper said.
But State Election Board Executive Director Mike Coan, assigned by the board to examine whether challenges are being unfairly denied in eight counties, said he believes challengers are providing “a free public service for our state” by helping clean up the rolls. Some counties say challenges compiled using EagleAI don't meet the legal standard to remove a voter, but Coan disagrees.
“When you’ve got people out there who have technology that is far superior, you should be listening, not turning your head and looking the other way,” Coan said.
He concluded the denial of many challenges by counties “goes against the very spirit and the letter of the law.”
“There are thousands and thousands of challenges that have been dismissed arbitrarily,” Coan told board members. He and Trump-aligned board members suggested the board should make statewide rules to guarantee more challenges are heard.
Federal and state law may conflict
Rulemaking would confront underlying disagreements over whether federal and state laws block counties from hearing the vast majority of activists' challenges. Justice Department guidance issued last month suggests some parts of the state law that took effect July 1 are overridden by federal law.
After the 2020 election, the GOP-led state legislature specified each voter can file unlimited challenges against other people in their county. That came after Texas-based vote monitoring group True the Vote challenged 364,000 Georgia voters prior to two U.S. Senate runoffs in 2021. Lawmakers this year enacted another law that defined probable cause for removing challenged voters and said counties could remove voters until 45 days before the election.
But federal law says a state can make systematic changes to voter rolls only up to 90 days before an election. The Justice Department guidance says systematic changes include not only government-led efforts but also challenges compiled using programs like EagleAI.
Even some deeply Republican counties postponed action until January, but a few counties have considered action after the 90-day deadline.
Another disagreement involves challenges to people who have moved.
Through routine voter list maintenance that doesn't require a challenge, officials remove voters who are dead, convicted of felonies, mentally incompetent or no longer living in Georgia.
But federal law says Georgia can only cancel a registration for a voter who has moved if the voter doesn’t respond to a mailing, enters what is called inactive status, and then doesn’t vote in the two following federal general elections. That process takes more than two years.
Challengers, relying on change-of-address lists, have been targeting inactive voters for immediate removal. They argue the waiting period doesn't apply to challenges.
Officials in Democratic counties have routinely disagreed, but some Republican-dominated counties see it differently. Forsyth County has removed or placed in challenged status 635 voters since July 1, according to board minutes, accounting for 80% of challenges upheld in surveyed counties.
Forsyth County remains an outlier, though. For now, voter challenges have had little impact in Georgia. But if courts and the Republican-majority State Election Board smooth the path, that could change. Challengers show no signs of going away.