Democrats Jason Carter and Michelle Nunn need to scrape together every vote they can. Georgia's voting backlog battle

ATLANTA — Democrats Michelle Nunn and Jason Carter need to scrape together every vote they can to take a Senate seat and the Georgia governor’s mansion in November.

And as many as 40,000 votes could now be at stake.


Civil rights groups filed a lawsuit on Friday over a backlog of new voter registrations some activists say is so large that it amounts to an act of voter suppression by the Republican secretary of state. State officials deny wrongdoing, saying county offices are methodically handling a surge in applications, and pointing to fraudulent forms as proof of the need for a careful process.

The fight is adding to the racial sensitivities in two already charged races, including one that could determine which party controls the Senate. With early voting due to start here Monday, the activists’ turn to the court suggests the homestretch in both the Senate and governors races could be even more fierce than expected.

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The lawsuit, filed in Fulton County Superior Court, requests that a judge order five counties and Secretary of State Brian Kemp to immediately process some 40,000 backlogged voter registration forms. Some of the forms, according to the civil rights groups, were turned in months ago.

“Waiting for the state to act is not an option for us because we have folks who applied back in March and April who have yet to make it onto the rolls,” said Democratic state Rep. Stacey Abrams, a 40-year-old Yale-trained lawyer who leads the New Georgia Project, a voter registration initiative behind many of the applications.

Jared Thomas, a spokesman for Kemp, said: “The state is following the law just as it always has. Any lawsuit to the contrary is frivolous.”

Fights over voting laws have hit the courts nationwide this year, but the stakes are especially high in Georgia.

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Carter, the grandson of former President Jimmy Carter, has a serious shot at ousting Republican Gov. Nathan Deal. Meanwhile, in a year where Republicans need to net just six seats to take control of the Senate, the open-seat Senate race here is a virtual tossup between Nunn and Republican David Perdue.

In all, more than 200,000 Georgians registered to vote between March and the Oct. 6 deadline, and the NGP says it is responsible for at least 86,000 of them. The NGP targeted groups such as racial minorities, unmarried women and young adults, all demographics that tend to favor Democrats. NGP leaders say there are about 40,000 people whom it helped fill out applications but who are either still not on the voter rolls nor listed as “pending.”

Kemp has dismissed the alarm, saying the applications are in the hands of the counties.

Thomas, his spokesman, said that “every county in Georgia is working to process forms right now,” and that “It would be against the law for any valid application that comes in before the deadline to not be processed and the voter to not have access to the election, and the letter of the law is being followed.”

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Still, NGP leaders are skeptical — and some are questioning the secretary of state’s motives. They note, for instance, that his office is devoting time to investigate the forms submitted by the NGP in search of fraud.

The group also contends that the state took months to deliver thousands of applications to Fulton County, a heavily black Atlanta suburb with a history of voting problems, and that letters from county election offices to applicants who need to send in more information contain unclear instructions.

“Somewhere in that mix, this feels like voter suppression,” said the Rev. Raphael G. Warnock, senior pastor at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church. During a joint interview with Abrams, he cast the moves as an effort to block black voters instead of reach out to them.

“It’s [Kemp’s] job to enfranchise voters, but he’s decided to go on a journey speculating about voter registration fraud that he’s not certain about, when we’re absolutely certain that there are people that have applied to vote that have not been enfranchised,” Warnock said.

Democrats this year are working hard to get out the vote among groups that typically don’t show up to the polls in midterm years, especially minorities, knowing that they could make the difference in tight races.

Carter spokesman Bryan Thomas, while declining to comment directly on the lawsuit, said, “We want to make sure that every person that tries to register to vote, who is eligible to vote, that registration should be processed, absolutely.”

“It’s been clear there have been some politically motivated efforts at decreasing access to voting, whether that’s through registration or opposing the expansion of polling sites and polling days,” he said. “Georgia is the cradle of the civil rights movement. We have no interest in going back to the dark days of voter suppression.”

Kemp’s office, meanwhile, has subpoenaed all of NGP’s forms to search for potential fraud. It issued the subpoena after counties started sending questionable forms to the state for verification. Of 133 forms flagged by counties, Kemp’s office deemed 50 as forgeries and 49 as suspicious, according to his spokesman.

Ryan Mahoney, a spokesman for the state Republican Party, said that ever since Kemp “launched this investigation into the NGP, they’ve been willing to do and say anything to cover their tracks and to change the narrative.”

“There’s no lawsuits that are necessary and no dog-and-pony show required,” he said. “It’s going to be close, and so every vote counts. So obviously his investigation has merit and their lawsuit does not.”

The secretary of state’s office has maintained that the investigation of NGP has no relationship to the counties’ efforts to process the registration forms. But those behind the voter registration push want to see Kemp provide more resources to help the counties finish the often difficult task of deciphering and matching handwritten forms.

The NGP hired a national firm to conduct polling and focus groups, looking at why people were reluctant to vote. It isolated three factors: people didn’t connect day-to-day issues to politics; they were intimidated by the simple act of voting (and believed their vote wouldn’t count); and they had no confidence in politicians.

Armed with messages to address these factors, the project and its partners, including the NAACP and the Asian American Legal Advocacy Center, fanned out to 150 of Georgia’s 159 counties. The groups intentionally started their work in March, rather than closer to the election, in case they encountered problems, Abrams said.

Independent demographers predict that Georgia will be a majority-minority state by 2025, driven by explosive growth around Atlanta and Savannah as rural areas shrink. Every racial group is growing faster than whites — and Asian and Hispanic populations are growing much faster than both whites and blacks.

Still, all of the statewide elected officials are white.

“Yes, demography’s been changing, but we’re at an inflection point,” Abrams said. “And that inflection point can determine whether this demographic change actually results in a change of power, or simply a shift of population.”

On Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld North Carolina’s restrictions on same-day registration, and voter ID laws are subjects of litigation in Texas and Wisconsin.

Georgia in 2007 implemented one of the country’s more stringent voter identification laws, requiring voters without a photo ID to use a provisional ballot. Other more recent efforts to increase minority turnout in the state have also fueled tensions.

For instance, DeKalb County, a diverse, heavily Democratic area covering much of Atlanta’s suburbs, decided that early voting precincts would be open on the Sunday before Election Day this year — the first instance of Sunday voting in the state; five additional counties followed suit, and others are considering it. DeKalb, which has more than 700,000 people, also moved an early voting precinct to a mall popular with black shoppers.

But the moves have drawn criticism from many in the GOP.

Deal, the governor, alleged that allowing the Sunday vote had partisan motivations. And Republican state Sen. Fran Millar, vowing to block moves like DeKalb’s during the next legislative session, drew accusations of racism when he explained on Facebook, “I would prefer more educated voters than a greater increase in the number of voters.”

Lee May, DeKalb’s interim chief executive, denied any partisan motivation.

Nahal Toosi contributed to this report.