Brynn Anderson/AP Photo
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger speaks during a news conference on November 30, 2020, in Atlanta.
More than a month of relentless scrutiny of the general election in Georgia has led to a hand recount of the presidential ballots, groundless lawsuits from the Trump campaign, and now an investigation from Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger into four organizations dedicated to voter registration and outreach.
For upholding the validity of Georgia’s presidential vote, both Raffensperger and Republican Gov. Brian Kemp have been subjected to vicious attacks by President Trump and his followers. Until last month, however, both Raffensperger and Kemp (who preceded Raffensperger as secretary of state) had engaged in ultra-partisan purges of disproportionately Democratic voters from the state’s voter rolls. Raffensperger’s current efforts appear to be a reversion to his more customary partisan biases.
Raffensperger announced his new investigation during one of his office’s now twice-daily press conferences on Monday, November 30, zeroing in solely on progressive operations: The New Georgia Project, America Votes, Vote Forward, and Operation New Voter Registration Georgia. His allegations against the groups, however, have failed to highlight more than one-off oddities, some of which have also occurred under the aegis of Republican organizations—none of which Raffensperger is investigating.
The New Georgia Project has been an active grassroots organization in the Peach State, and its former CEO, the Rev. Raphael Warnock, is on the ballot for the January senatorial runoff in the special election against appointed incumbent Kelly Loeffler. The group has been accused of sending voter registration applications (there are no estimations of how many) to New York City. Raffensperger did not say, however, that any resident of another state actually voted in November’s election, which would be a felony offense.
The secretary of state’s announcement also made no mention of the fact that Georgia’s Republican Party sent absentee ballot request forms out of state. The Prospect reported in September that at least one request form made it to a household in New Jersey and another to one in Oregon.
America Votes and Vote Forward are also being accused of mailing irregularities. According to Raffensperger, America Votes sent an absentee ballot to one voter’s old address from the ’90s. However, the organization says, it’s only ever sent absentee ballot request forms. A number of such groups took on the responsibility of mailing out these forms ahead of the November election after Raffensperger decided not to, though he had sent out such request forms in the June primary.
The secretary of state’s office also alleges that Vote Forward sent one voter registration form out of state to a deceased resident of Alabama. In response, Vote Forward issued a statement declaring that none of the 19 million letters the organization sent this year included voter registration forms, and that it does not directly register people to vote.
“We rely on a third-party vendor for voter information and try to make sure this data is as accurate as possible. However, the data is imperfect and there are some inconsistencies that we can neither predict nor control,” a spokesperson for Vote Forward said via email. “If any letter recipient has moved out of state or passed away, they will of course be unable to register to vote in Georgia, and the letter itself will have no effect.”
Raffensperger accused Operation New Voter Registration Georgia of canvassing college voters to register to vote at their Georgia-based universities. “Telling college students in Georgia that they can change their residency to Georgia and then change it back after the election,” Raffensperger said at the press conference, was illegal. “Let me be very clear again: Voting in Georgia, when you are not a resident of Georgia, is a felony. And encouraging college kids to commit felonies with no regard for what it might mean for them is despicable.”
Despite the secretary’s threatening language, it is legal in Georgia, according to the Campus Vote Project, for students to register to vote where they go to school in lieu of their home address, as long as they are only registered and vote in one place. Moreover, Raffensperger may have other difficulties in his examination of the group. The Prospect could not find Operation New Voter Registration Georgia online, and the AP reports that its email to the group bounced back.
Given the pressure Raffensperger has come under from Trump and South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham to recognize nonexistent election fraud and toss out legally cast ballots in the presidential election, and the attacks he has weathered when he refused to do so, his investigations could be seen as a way to win back support from Republicans now eager to oust him in the 2022 statewide Republican primary.
One way to restore his reputation among the party faithful could be to inhibit the organizations he’s targeted from bringing out the Democratic vote in the state’s January 5 Senate runoffs. Given Georgia’s long history of white suppression of Black voting and more recent history of Republican suppression of Democratic voting, Raffensperger can always claim to be reverting to the Georgia norm, in the hope that the state’s Republicans will appreciate and reward his reversion.
