Georgia election officials say they’re complying with a federal judge’s recommendations to improve citizenship and felon verification, but the voting rights group that sued the state says changes aren’t coming quickly enough.
One year after a trial began over Georgia’s registration and absentee voting laws, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office plans to implement routine citizenship checks by the end of 2023. The new system would help prevent new U.S. citizens from being incorrectly labeled as ineligible to vote until they show documentation.
A more accurate method of flagging voter registrations of felons — who aren’t allowed to vote in Georgia until they have completed their sentences — has recently been put in place in response to the judge’s decision in September, according to the secretary of state’s office.
When U.S. District Judge Steve Jones ruled in favor of Raffensperger and against Fair Fight Action, he also urged the government to do more to protect voters from being disenfranchised. The decision ended the four-year case that arose from Democrat Stacey Abrams’ complaints about Georgia’s voting laws following her loss to Republican Brian Kemp in the state’s 2018 race for governor.
During the trial, naturalized U.S. citizens testified that they faced barriers to voting because their registration records weren’t updated after they earned citizenship. Several witnesses said their voter registrations were canceled because they had been incorrectly labeled as felons based on the secretary of state’s broad identification process that resulted in false matches.
Election officials waited to modify verification practices until after the February launch of an upgraded statewide voter registration system called GARViS, which stands for the Georgia Registered Voter Information System.
“These changes in GARViS will provide tighter and more accurate matching criteria for counties to utilize when they conduct regular felon matching,” Raffensperger said in a statement. Election officials will also more regularly use a federal immigration verification service called SAVE “that will add to amplified automation and efficiency,” he said.
Fair Fight Action CEO Cianti Stewart-Reid said state election officials should work with more urgency to ensure the government doesn’t hinder legitimate voters.
“When it comes to protecting voting rights and improving voter access, Secretary Raffensperger is really all talk and no action,” Stewart-Reid said. “It’s been plenty of time for the secretary of state to work on reducing Georgia’s unconstitutional and racially discriminatory barriers to the ballot box.”
During the trial, an expert witness for Fair Fight Action testified that 87% of voters flagged because their citizenship couldn’t be verified were people of color as of January 2020.
Then in March 2022, a review by the secretary of state’s office showed that 63% of about 4,500 voters with pending registrations were found to be citizens after a check of federal records. Election officials investigated the registrations of those whose citizenship couldn’t be confirmed, and none of them had cast a ballot in an election.
In his ruling, Jones declined to order the secretary of state to conduct a more rigorous citizenship verification process because it was already being implemented. Officials for the secretary of state’s office said during the trial that the project would take one to three months.
Jones found that Georgia’s process of identifying potential felons “severely burdened voters,” but he didn’t find a violation by the state government because county election officials are ultimately responsible.
Under the new felon matching process, election officials are checking first names, last names, birth dates and the last four digits of Social Security numbers. The previous system that relied on last names, birth dates, gender and race is no longer in use.
If the secretary of state’s office hadn’t followed the judge’s recommendations, county elections offices could have faced potential lawsuits at a time when they need to be preparing for next year’s elections, said Ryan Germany, a former attorney for Raffensperger’s office.
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