General Discussion

After the Purge
How a massive voter purge in Georgia affected the 2018 election

State officials claimed that people removed from the voter rolls for inactivity had likely died or moved away. But an APM Reports investigation found tens of thousands who hadn't — and still wanted to vote.
On Election Day 2018, James Baiye II drove to Lucerne Baptist Church in the same suburban Atlanta neighborhood where he'd been registered to vote for most of his adult life. He dropped his brother and elderly mother at the front door, parked the car and got in line. Though he'd been registered for years, the 31-year-old African American hadn't been a frequent voter. He'd spent a few years playing football at a junior college in North Carolina. In 2012, Baiye says, he requested an absentee ballot but there's no record of it in the state's voter file. In fact, he hadn't cast an in-person ballot since 2008, when Barack Obama first ran for president.

This year was different. He'd become excited about candidacy of Stacey Abrams, the Democrat who was vying to become Georgia's first African-American governor, and the nation's first-ever black woman to lead a U.S. state. It wasn't Abrams' race that swayed Baiye, he said, but rather her pledge to run the government differently. "A lot of being there for the people," he said. "I just wanted to see her succeed."

But when Baiye finally reached the front of the line, there was a problem. Poll workers couldn't find his name on their list of registered voters. This was puzzling: Baiye is a citizen, he wasn't a felon, and he hadn't moved.
What Baiye didn't know was he'd been caught up in one of the most hotly debated campaign issues in Georgia. It turned out that a year earlier Baiye had been removed from the voter rolls in a purge led by the office of Republican Secretary of State Brian Kemp, who was running for governor against Abrams.

On a single day in late July 2017, Kemp's office had removed from the rolls 560,000 Georgians who had been flagged because they'd skipped one too many elections. Abrams would later call the purge the "use-it-or-lose-it scheme." An APM Reports investigation last year estimated 107,000 of the people purged under the policy would otherwise have been eligible to vote last year, just like Baiye.

https://www.apmreports.org/story/2019/10/29/georgia-voting-registration-records-removed

The Georgia secretary of state’s office paid $30,000 to resolve a lawsuit over the state’s role in Crosscheck, a defunct program for canceling voter registrations.
The settlement ended the lawsuit, but the plaintiffs didn’t get what they had sought: records showing that Gov. Brian Kemp, when he was secretary of state, had used Crosscheck to cancel Georgia voters.
Though Georgia election officials contributed voter information to other states that participated in Crosscheck, they said they never used it on their own voters. They said the cancellations of 534,000 Georgia voter registrations in 2017 and 287,000 registrations in 2019 were done separately from Crosscheck.
The settlement was obtained Friday by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution through the Georgia Open Records Act.
The Crosscheck program, which ended in 2019, collected voter registration lists from Georgia and other states to identify potentially invalid and duplicative registrations. Voting rights groups have criticized Crosscheck for inaccuracies that erroneously flagged legitimate voters.
Greg Palast, a journalist who filed the lawsuit against Kemp, said it verified that Georgia participated in the effort to remove voters in dozens of states. Crosscheck was led by then-Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, and Georgia enrolled in the program from 2013 to 2017.
“They can’t deny they were part of the Crosscheck program,” Palast said. “The Georgia list, we know for 100% certain, was used to purge voters in other states.

The settlement in September also required Georgia to disclose, if possible, voter registration records provided to the state through the Crosscheck program.
But neither Georgia nor Kansas’ secretary of state’s office still had a copy of the 2016 and 2017 Crosscheck lists sought by the lawsuit. The lists were destroyed in accordance with a memorandum of understanding between the states, Kansas’ elections director wrote in an email to attorneys for the Georgia secretary of state’s office.
https://www.removepaywall.com/search?url=https://www.ajc.com/politics/lawsuit-over-georgias-participation-in-crosscheck-purge-program-settled/MVC26T6QIFDCDH2PC6WX7ZYXO4/