The Cobb County Board of Elections will pass the cost of notifying voters to the individuals doing the challenging after activists filed thousands of such challenges last month.
The new policy would require challengers to pay the cost of printing the challenge notice and first-class mail postage. Cobb Elections Director Tate Fall estimated the 2,472 challenges filed last month cost county taxpayers $1,600.
Cobb approved the new challenge notification policy Monday in a 4-1 vote, with Republican member Debbie Fisher in opposition.
Fisher said it is “egregious” that Cobb would put the burden of maintaining a clean voter roll onto citizen voters.
“Any way you cut it, it’s wrong,” she said.
Cobb County Republican Party Chair Salleigh Grubbs agreed.
“It is your job to ensure we have clean voter rolls, and you’re not doing your job,” Grubbs said.
The board’s attorney, Daniel White, compared passing along notification costs to the cost associated with a serving lawsuit notice.
White said before state legislators passed laws allowing activists to file mass challenges, sending a notice to a “handful of voters” was no burden to the county. Challenges filed by the thousands demand significantly more time and energy from the county’s election staff, he said.
“When we are talking about 3,000 voters being challenged and notice having to go out to 3,000 voters, that really increases your costs,” White said.
Along with Cobb, the election boards in DeKalb and Gwinnett counties have discussed charging vote challengers similar notification fees.
The move by the Cobb board came after Republican state lawmakers passed several laws aimed at the electoral process, including a law allowing citizens to challenge an unlimited number of voters. Republicans have zeroed in on election law amid claims of voter fraud following the 2020 presidential election that were debunked through numerous investigations and court cases.
Often, challenges are filed using EagleAI, a software program that compiles lists of voters who may have moved out of the state, but White said researching the legitimacy of these challenges puts a burden on the county.
“What you are doing is asking the staff to do the research that your system doesn’t do,” White said.
EagleAI has promoted the software as a way for state and local governments to clean voter rolls of potentially illegitimate voters.
However, the software cannot access private voter information used to determine voter eligibility, such as birth dates, Social Security numbers and driver’s license numbers. The software captures data through the use of voter rolls, obituaries, tax records and change-of-address information.
Left-leaning voting rights organizations fear EagleAI could be used to cancel the registration of legitimate voters. Recently, organizations filed a federal lawsuit to overturn the latest state mass challenge law.
Conservative activists have contested the eligibility of more than 350,000 voters across the state since the 2020 general election. The overwhelming majority of challenges have been dismissed by county election boards, but more challenges are expected ahead of November’s presidential election.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct an analogy made by board attorney Daniel White. White compared charging fees to people challenging voter eligibility to fees associated with serving a lawsuit. The original story misstated his analogy.
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