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The Guardian reports:
Georgia secretary of state and gubernatorial candidate Brian Kemp improperly purged more than 340,000 voters from the state's registration rolls, an investigation charges.
Greg Palast, a journalist and the director of the Palast Investigative Fund, said an analysis he commissioned found 340,134 voters were removed from the rolls on the grounds that they had moved - but they actually still live at the address where they are registered.
"Their registration is cancelled. Not pending, not inactive – cancelled. If they show up to vote on 6 November, they will not be allowed to vote. That's wrong," Palast told reporters on a call on Friday. "We can prove they're still there. They should be allowed to vote."
[...] Palast and the Georgia Coalition for the People's Agenda filed a lawsuit against Kemp on Friday to force him to release additional records related to the state's removal of voters.
Under Georgia procedures, registered voters who have not cast ballots for three years are sent a notice asking them to confirm they still live at their address. If they don't return it, they are marked inactive. If they don't vote for two more general elections after that, they are removed from the rolls.
(Score: 5, Informative) by RandomFactor on Wednesday October 24 2018, @12:10AM (1 child)
TFA uses the word improperly improperly. The article should be aimed at Georgia procedures for cleaning the roles, not the individual tasked with enforcing them.
It appears Kemp was, in fact following the law in the state. Basically just doing his job the same as every year since appointed.
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from TFA:
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TFA discusses 2016-2018. However the pace of removing registrations for individuals not meeting the law hasn't changed significantly since 2012. 1.4Million were removed in 2012-2018 (6 years), but .53Million from 2016-2018. You could make an argument that the removal rate has actually slowed a bit the past few years.
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The particular journalist is a political operative and the article is timed accordingly.
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If someone does not vote for five elections straight, and ignores a notice to confirm their residence for registration, they probably really don't give much of a damn anyway. The procedure seems reasonable enough as far as where to draw the line for purging the roles. Unless the view is that the roles should simply never be purged.
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Myself I wouldn't waste a lot of time on it if it came up in Georgia - just cast a provisional ballot and don't yell at your friendly neighborhood poll worker. If a race of importance is razor close fight to get the ballot counted (I'm sure your party of choice would be glad to assist...). If nothing was close anyway, reregister to vote for next time and be done. Total time wasted about 10 minutes (except in the extremely unlikely event of a super close race). The only people who should waste endless hours on politics are politicians :-)
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I kinda liked how Iraq managed the issue that purging the roles is aimed at (until ISIS started killing people with ink on their fingers...sigh...)
В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 24 2018, @10:26AM
Or they moved out of Georgia.
I moved out of one state into another last year. Being a responsible citizen, I tried to find a way to UNregister to vote in the state I was moving out of, or just tell them "hey, I'm leaving so I won't be voting here anymore". There wasn't one. The system was set up to register people, but no way for the person to unregister themselves. (Perhaps there's some way buried deep in some law book somewhere, but when you're moving cross-country you have more pressing things to worry about, and since it wasn't on their website, I had to just let it go)
Until that state purges their rolls of inactive voters, anyone could walk into my former polling place, pretend to be me, and vote in my name. There's nothing I can do about it. As this is a great way to enable voting fraud, I think this is precisely how certain political parties want it to be.