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The lawsuit challenging Georgia’s entire elections system, explained
More than two months after voting rights groups filed the suit, Georgia elections officials are calling for it to be dismissed.
By P.R. Lockhart Updated Jan 29, 2019, 12:19pm EST
In the 2018 election cycle, perhaps no state race was as closely watched as Georgia’s gubernatorial contest.
The high-profile contest between Republican Brian Kemp and Democrat Stacey Abrams drew more attention in its final weeks as voting problems fueled allegations of voter suppression and threatened to undercut the power of Georgia’s nonwhite voters.
Shortly after Abrams officially ended her campaign last year, an organization led by Abrams’s allies and backed by the former candidate filed a lawsuit that seeks to overhaul the state’s controversial election system, arguing that the current system violates the constitutional rights of voters of color.
The suit was filed last November by Fair Fight Action, the nonprofit arm of a new voting rights organization founded by Abrams, and Care in Action, a group that organizes domestic workers in the state. The lawsuit names the state board of elections and then-interim Georgia Secretary of State Robyn Crittenden as its main defendants, but the lawsuit is truly aimed at Kemp, who did not resign from his position as the state’s chief elections officer until two days after the election.
“The general election for governor is over, but the citizens and voters of Georgia deserve an election system that they can have confidence in,” Lauren Groh-Wargo, the CEO of Fair Fight and Abrams’s former campaign manager, told reporters last year. Abrams is a member of Fair Fight’s board, but is not a specific party named in the lawsuit.
The 66-page lawsuit highlights voting issues that affected the state including voter purges, registration applications put on hold, Election Day troubles at predominantly nonwhite voting precincts, and problems with voters’ absentee and provisional ballots.
Each of these issues fueled their own series of lawsuits (several of them successful) in the weeks before and after the election, but this latest lawsuit cites them collectively to make a larger point: Georgia’s current election system created an unconstitutional series of obstacles that are disproportionately likely to disadvantage, and in some cases completely disenfranchise, voters of color.
To resolve this, the plaintiffs propose a number of reforms, including ending the use of electronic voting machines without a paper trail and stopping purges of infrequent voters, and asks that these changes be implemented prior to the 2020 election. The suit also requests that Georgia be placed back under preclearance requirements, which required a federal judge to approve proposed statewide voting measures to ensure they did not harm minority voters. Georgia was freed from this supervision in 2013 when the Supreme Court struck down part of the Voting Rights Act.
On January 28, Georgia election officials finally responded to the suit, calling for it to be dismissed. In the motion, recently elected Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger argued that any voting issues in the 2018 elections were due to the independent actions of local officials.
“The complaint combines a variety of claims in an attempt to cobble together a new theory — that a variety of independent and unrelated actions by mostly local official somehow resulted in a series of constitutional violations that require massive judicial intervention,” the motion says.
Fair Fight counters that it has “compelling and irrefutable evidence of an interlocking system of voter suppression that has unfairly impacted election outcomes.”
The arguments raised in the 2018 lawsuit and the backlash to them are part of a broader series of fights over voting rights and access to the ballot in states across the country. While it is too early to say how it will fare in court, the lawsuit’s depiction of the struggles of nonwhite voters are part of an argument that voting rights groups have often advanced when challenging state restrictions: that obstacles to voting have created a two-tiered voting system that disproportionately affects voters of color and limits the power of their votes.
The Georgia suit, however, specifically asks not for the reversal of one or two voting restrictions, but instead challenges the legitimacy of a system that would allow such disparities to exist.
“Fair elections ensure the consent of the governed; they are the moral foundation of the compact between the government and its citizens,” the lawsuit notes. “In the 2018 General Election, Georgia’s elections officials broke that compact.”
There were several voting rights issues in the Georgia election
In the weeks before the election, Kemp was repeatedly criticized for measures taken by his office, including voter purges that removed more than a million names from the state’s voter rolls between 2012 and 2016. He has also faced several complaints and lawsuits alleging that he was suppressing minority voters, particularly black voters, in an effort to keep Abrams from winning the election.
Several voting and civil rights groups, Abrams’s campaign, and former President Jimmy Carter all called for Kemp to resign from his position as Georgia’s top elections official, arguing that it was a serious conflict of interest.
On October 9, the Associated Press reported that 53,000 voter registrations, 70 percent of them from black applicants, were being held by Kemp’s office for failing to clear an “exact match” process that compares registration information to Social Security and state driver records. While Kemp’s office argued that these voters would be allowed to vote on Election Day if they presented an ID, a number of voters reported problems when they tried to vote, and some said they were turned away from the polls.
Fair Fight’s lawsuit cites individual stories from Georgia voters to illustrate exactly how much of a burden these problems placed on voters. In its review of the exact match system, the suit mentions Carlos del Rio, the chair of the Department of Global Health Studies at the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University.
When del Rio went to his voting precinct on November 6, he was told that he could not vote because an error in a state database caused his surname to be listed as “delRio,” a difference that left poll workers unable to verify him as a voter. After explaining the issue to elections officials, del Rio was eventually allowed to cast a ballot, but only “after being forced to navigate a lengthy process,” according to the lawsuit.
Other voters weren’t so lucky. Tyra Bates, a resident of Gwinnett County, Georgia, registered to vote online in October. Bates received a confirmation of her registration, but was told that she was not registered when she went to her voting precinct. She was also not allowed to cast a provisional ballot, and left without voting.
The suit also cites problems with Georgia’s election infrastructure, arguing that Kemp did not take proper measures to ensure election security. Two years ago, Kemp turned down the Department of Homeland Security’s offer to provide election and cybersecurity assistance before the 2016 election, saying that the move would have given the federal government too much power over the state system.
More than two months after voting rights groups filed the suit, Georgia elections officials are calling for it to be dismissed.
By P.R. Lockhart Updated Jan 29, 2019, 12:19pm EST
In the 2018 election cycle, perhaps no state race was as closely watched as Georgia’s gubernatorial contest.
The high-profile contest between Republican Brian Kemp and Democrat Stacey Abrams drew more attention in its final weeks as voting problems fueled allegations of voter suppression and threatened to undercut the power of Georgia’s nonwhite voters.
Shortly after Abrams officially ended her campaign last year, an organization led by Abrams’s allies and backed by the former candidate filed a lawsuit that seeks to overhaul the state’s controversial election system, arguing that the current system violates the constitutional rights of voters of color.
The suit was filed last November by Fair Fight Action, the nonprofit arm of a new voting rights organization founded by Abrams, and Care in Action, a group that organizes domestic workers in the state. The lawsuit names the state board of elections and then-interim Georgia Secretary of State Robyn Crittenden as its main defendants, but the lawsuit is truly aimed at Kemp, who did not resign from his position as the state’s chief elections officer until two days after the election.
“The general election for governor is over, but the citizens and voters of Georgia deserve an election system that they can have confidence in,” Lauren Groh-Wargo, the CEO of Fair Fight and Abrams’s former campaign manager, told reporters last year. Abrams is a member of Fair Fight’s board, but is not a specific party named in the lawsuit.
The 66-page lawsuit highlights voting issues that affected the state including voter purges, registration applications put on hold, Election Day troubles at predominantly nonwhite voting precincts, and problems with voters’ absentee and provisional ballots.
Each of these issues fueled their own series of lawsuits (several of them successful) in the weeks before and after the election, but this latest lawsuit cites them collectively to make a larger point: Georgia’s current election system created an unconstitutional series of obstacles that are disproportionately likely to disadvantage, and in some cases completely disenfranchise, voters of color.
To resolve this, the plaintiffs propose a number of reforms, including ending the use of electronic voting machines without a paper trail and stopping purges of infrequent voters, and asks that these changes be implemented prior to the 2020 election. The suit also requests that Georgia be placed back under preclearance requirements, which required a federal judge to approve proposed statewide voting measures to ensure they did not harm minority voters. Georgia was freed from this supervision in 2013 when the Supreme Court struck down part of the Voting Rights Act.
On January 28, Georgia election officials finally responded to the suit, calling for it to be dismissed. In the motion, recently elected Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger argued that any voting issues in the 2018 elections were due to the independent actions of local officials.
“The complaint combines a variety of claims in an attempt to cobble together a new theory — that a variety of independent and unrelated actions by mostly local official somehow resulted in a series of constitutional violations that require massive judicial intervention,” the motion says.
Fair Fight counters that it has “compelling and irrefutable evidence of an interlocking system of voter suppression that has unfairly impacted election outcomes.”
The arguments raised in the 2018 lawsuit and the backlash to them are part of a broader series of fights over voting rights and access to the ballot in states across the country. While it is too early to say how it will fare in court, the lawsuit’s depiction of the struggles of nonwhite voters are part of an argument that voting rights groups have often advanced when challenging state restrictions: that obstacles to voting have created a two-tiered voting system that disproportionately affects voters of color and limits the power of their votes.
The Georgia suit, however, specifically asks not for the reversal of one or two voting restrictions, but instead challenges the legitimacy of a system that would allow such disparities to exist.
“Fair elections ensure the consent of the governed; they are the moral foundation of the compact between the government and its citizens,” the lawsuit notes. “In the 2018 General Election, Georgia’s elections officials broke that compact.”
There were several voting rights issues in the Georgia election
In the weeks before the election, Kemp was repeatedly criticized for measures taken by his office, including voter purges that removed more than a million names from the state’s voter rolls between 2012 and 2016. He has also faced several complaints and lawsuits alleging that he was suppressing minority voters, particularly black voters, in an effort to keep Abrams from winning the election.
Several voting and civil rights groups, Abrams’s campaign, and former President Jimmy Carter all called for Kemp to resign from his position as Georgia’s top elections official, arguing that it was a serious conflict of interest.
On October 9, the Associated Press reported that 53,000 voter registrations, 70 percent of them from black applicants, were being held by Kemp’s office for failing to clear an “exact match” process that compares registration information to Social Security and state driver records. While Kemp’s office argued that these voters would be allowed to vote on Election Day if they presented an ID, a number of voters reported problems when they tried to vote, and some said they were turned away from the polls.
Fair Fight’s lawsuit cites individual stories from Georgia voters to illustrate exactly how much of a burden these problems placed on voters. In its review of the exact match system, the suit mentions Carlos del Rio, the chair of the Department of Global Health Studies at the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University.
When del Rio went to his voting precinct on November 6, he was told that he could not vote because an error in a state database caused his surname to be listed as “delRio,” a difference that left poll workers unable to verify him as a voter. After explaining the issue to elections officials, del Rio was eventually allowed to cast a ballot, but only “after being forced to navigate a lengthy process,” according to the lawsuit.
Other voters weren’t so lucky. Tyra Bates, a resident of Gwinnett County, Georgia, registered to vote online in October. Bates received a confirmation of her registration, but was told that she was not registered when she went to her voting precinct. She was also not allowed to cast a provisional ballot, and left without voting.
The suit also cites problems with Georgia’s election infrastructure, arguing that Kemp did not take proper measures to ensure election security. Two years ago, Kemp turned down the Department of Homeland Security’s offer to provide election and cybersecurity assistance before the 2016 election, saying that the move would have given the federal government too much power over the state system.