Columbus Republican leader files challenge to thousands of voters with out of state addresses
A local Republican has filed a challenge with the Muscogee County elections board, asking it to review residency requirements for Columbus voters with out of state mailing addresses.
That means those voters will have to file provisional ballots if they show up to vote in person for Georgia’s Jan. 5 U.S. Senate and Public Service Commission runoffs. If they vote absentee by mail, those ballots will be set aside for further review.
The board may decide to count the ballots if the voters prove they live in Muscogee County. It also may decide such proof is unnecessary, if all the challenger has to dispute the voters’ residency is an out of town address, and no additional evidence that they are ineligible.
“If they are a legal voter, we want them to vote. If they are not, we don’t,” said Alton Russell, who filed the formal challenge with the Muscogee County Board of Elections and Registration, which met via conference call at 2 p.m. Wednesday to acknowledge “probable cause” to pursue the review.
Russell chairs the Muscogee County Republican Party, but said he filed the challenge only as a county resident, and not on behalf of the party. “The effort is strictly not a partisan effort,” he said.
It involves 4,034 names of people on the voter rolls who showed up on a postal service “National Change of Address” list as having addresses in other states. That does not mean they all have been voting: Some have not voted in years, having moved away and established residency elsewhere.
But others have legitimate reasons to have their ballots sent out of state, such as those deployed overseas with the armed forces, and college students living elsewhere to attend school, while maintaining residency here in Columbus.
Nancy Boren, Columbus’ elections director, said three people found their votes were challenged Wednesday, and had to file provisional ballots. One was a university student who had a Georgia driver’s license and a paycheck stub with a Muscogee County address.
At its emergency meeting Wednesday, the five-member elections board found probable cause to accept the challenge, though it decided ballots from those deployed with the armed forces will not be subject to review.
Linda Parker, the board’s Democratic Party representative, was reluctant to accept any challenge.
“This is ridiculous,” Parker said on the conference call. “It’s like voter suppression. That’s what it sounds like to me.”
A Georgia Democratic Party representative attending the meeting said a similar challenge in Fulton County was dismissed in Superior Court. That representative, Richard Parker, who is not related to Linda Parker, said Russell should have to produce more evidence than a change of address list to justify his challenge. Russell did not attend the meeting.
The election board’s attorney, Thomas Gristina of the Columbus firm Page, Scrantom, Sprouse, Tucker & Ford, said the board will decide which challenged votes to count when it meets after the Jan. 5 runoff to certify the official results.
Though the challenged voters will be asked to produce evidence of their residency, the burden of proof rests with the challenger, and the final decision with the board, he said. So if some voters fail to provide that evidence, the board may ask Russell whether he has anything other than a change of address list to challenge those votes. If the list is all Russell has, the board may decide that is insufficient, and count the challenged ballots, Gristina said.
The board also may call another emergency meeting before the election to reconsider its decision, or to take additional action, he said.
Boren said after the board meeting that many of those challenged have been sent notices informing them that postal service records indicate they have moved, and asking whether they want to remain registered here. If they have not responded or voted here since they were notified, they were moved to the county’s “inactive” voter rolls, she said.
Eventually they will be purged from the voter registration list, which periodically is updated to cull those who’ve moved away, but so far they remain registered, she said.
This story was originally published December 16, 2020 at 12:26 PM with the headline "Columbus Republican leader files challenge to thousands of voters with out of state addresses."