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In a defeat for Georgia Secretary of State and Republican gubernatorial candidate Brian Kemp, a federal judge ruled Friday that 3,141 recently naturalized US citizens whose voter registrations were placed on hold must be allowed to vote Tuesday.

The naturalized citizens’ voter applications were originally held up by Georgia’s “exact match,” apparently because their new citizenship status was not yet updated in Georgia’s driver database. Voting rights activists say many of them are minority voters.

Kristen Clark, president of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which brought the lawsuit, said, “This eliminates the unfair burdens that those voters would have faced on Election Day."

"These voters could have lost the right to vote. They never should have been burdened like this in the first place," she added.

She explained that people who recently became citizens were particularly burdened by the state’s "exact match" policy, because those in pending status would have had to find deputy registrars on Election Day and provide proof of citizenship to vote.

“It’s often impossible to find those officials on Election Day,” Clark said.

Read the court order here: