Columbus election board getting sued after challenging some runoff voter addresses
A voter advocacy group is suing the Muscogee County elections board over its allowing a local Republican to challenge the residency of thousands of registered Columbus voters who filed notice of a change of address.
The suit follows a Dec. 16 meeting at which the board found “probable cause” to pursue the complaint filed by Alton Russell, who chairs the Muscogee County Republican Party.
As a result, if any of the 4,034 voters challenged try to vote in Georgia’s Jan. 5 runoffs for U.S. Senate and state Public Service Commission, they will have to file provisional ballots, and they will be asked to document their residency before the board decides whether to count their votes.
Most of them likely will not vote, because they have moved from Columbus and established residency elsewhere, and eventually will be purged from the voter rolls. But others, such as college students, workers on temporary assignment and adult children caring for elderly parents, are voting absentee by mail only because they can’t be here for the election.
Those deployed with the armed forces also change their addresses for voting, but the elections board voted to reject any challenge to those ballots.
Because they changed their address with the U.S. Postal Service, the voters’ names showed up on a “National Change of Address” or NCOA list that each county elections office periodically compares to its voter rolls, before sending them notices asking whether they have moved away permanently. If they do not respond, they will, over time, be removed from the registration lists.
But their showing up on the NCOA list alone does not prove they no longer live here, and the burden of proving they are not eligible to vote falls on the challenger, not the voters, attorneys said.
Forcing them to document their residency, particularly over the holiday season during a pandemic, creates an unnecessary and illegal burden that risks disenfranchising them on scant evidence, says the lawsuit filed Thursday in federal court by the nonprofit group Majority Forward.
“Because NCOA data alone cannot supply probable cause to support a challenge under Georgia law, the challenges must be denied immediately,” it says. “Jeopardizing any individual’s right to vote on the basis of NCOA data in this manner is also expressly prohibited by the National Voter Registration Act, and it is doubly forbidden this close to an election for federal office. Even more, the boards’ actions violate the First and Fourteenth Amendments of the federal Constitution because they unduly burden the right to vote.”
Majority Forward says it filed the suit on behalf of Gamaliel Warren Turner Sr., a government contractor with the U.S. Navy who’s temporarily living in California for work: “Mr. Turner is a targeted voter and his absentee ballot request has been marked as ‘challenged.’ Mr. Turner has not received any instructions regarding how to prove his eligibility to vote in the January runoff elections.’
Citing multiple court precedents, the lawsuit notes the federal government through the National Voter Registration Act has specific restrictions on removing voters with an election for federal office at hand:
“This prohibition on removing voters from registration lists within 90 days of an election extends to both regular list maintenance programs and mass voter challenges…. Voting while outside of one’s voting jurisdiction is such a common occurrence that federal law places strict limitations on a state’s authority to cancel a voter’s registration — and thereby prevent the voter from casting a regular ballot — due to a purported address change.”
Under the voter registration act, the lawsuit says, a voter can’t be disqualified for residency unless the state gets written confirmation from the voter of a permanent address change, or the voter not only fails to respond to an NCOA notice from the elections office, but also “fails to vote in at least two subsequent federal general election cycles” – the criteria used in routine voter roll maintenance.
The suit notes also that relying on NCOA lists to challenge voters is problematic because of mismatches caused by duplicate names:
“To give an example of how frequent false matches can be, the January 2020 Georgia voter file contains records for 7,057,248 unique voters. There are over 1 million duplicates with the same combination of first name, last name, and age out of roughly 7 million registrants, including 272,256 combinations present twice, 127,816 present three times, and 57,854 present 10 or more times.”
Named as defendants in the suit are each individual on Muscogee County’s five-member elections board and elections director Nancy Boren, and the Ben Hill County elections director and its county board, which accepted a similar challenge. Both counties are in U.S. District Court’s Middle District of Georgia, but the suit was filed in the court’s Albany division, not in Columbus.
The suit asks that a judge issue an injunction prohibiting the boards from challenging voters based on the NCOA.
Boren could not be reached for comment Thursday, when her office was closed for a city government holiday. Thomas Gristina, the Page, Scrantom, Sprouse, Tucker and Ford attorney who represents the Muscogee elections board, declined to comment.