Ruling is blow to efforts by Democrat Stacey Abrams, though judge says those removed should receive more warning

Georgia doesn’t have to put almost 100,000 voters back on its rolls, a federal judge ruled Friday.

The US district judge Steve C Jones ruled that a voting rights advocacy group founded by Democrat Stacey Abrams is improperly asking him to interpret state law. Jones also said the group hasn’t proved that people who have been removed had their constitutional rights violated.

However, Jones also ordered Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to do more to warn people that they had been removed. The judge is especially singling out a south-west Georgia state House district where a 28 January special election is scheduled. Voters there who have been removed have only until Monday to re-register.

Raffensperger in October released a list of over 313,000 voters whose registrations were at risk of being canceled. Fair Fight Action, a voting rights group, had asked for the purge to be halted.

Voter purges in Georgia became a hot-button issue during last year’s race for governor between Abrams and Republican Brian Kemp, who won the race. Kemp served as secretary of state before being elected governor and oversaw aggressive voter purges during his tenure. Over 1.4m voter registrations were canceled in Georgia between 2012 and 2018.

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At issue is a Georgia law that says that voters should be moved to inactive status if they have no contact with the state for a period of time. Until earlier this year, the standard was three years of no contact, with voters then removed if they did not vote for another two general elections, a period of about seven years.

However, the general assembly amended the law in early 2019 to lengthen the no-contact period to five years, meaning voters have about nine years before their registrations are canceled. But the Republican Raffensperger went ahead with canceling registrations for people who were already on the inactive list instead of giving them two more years.

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Abrams’ group didn’t contest the removal of about 190,000 voters who had moved or to whom mail couldn’t be delivered.

However, it said removing a remaining 120,000 would be unfair because it would disenfranchise or burden them solely because they chose not to vote, and because people who were removed might not find out until they showed up to vote. It would be too late for them then because Georgia doesn’t offer same-day registration.