John Bazemore/AP Photo
Gwinnett County elections supervisor Zach Manifold looks over boxes of voter challenges on September 15, 2022, in Lawrenceville, Georgia.
In Georgia, an extraordinary effort by conservative groups to pull as many voters off the rolls as possible is under way, raising new concerns about turnout—and what such challenges might mean immediately before, during, and after Election Day. On Tuesday, the ACLU of Georgia formally asked the Gwinnett County Board of Voter Registrations and Elections to end its investigation into “eleventh hour” voter challenges filed by third-party groups in late August, which relies on “information” that cannot be substantiated and effectively “outsourcing” the challengers’ burdens of proof to overtaxed municipal officials.
The state’s second-most populous county, northeast of metro Atlanta, Gwinnett is ground zero for Georgia’s voter challenges: In the current cycle, some 37,500 voters have been challenged there, part of the 65,000 voters who have been challenged statewide. Senate Bill 202, the nefarious election administration law passed after the 2020 presidential election that dialed back election administration reforms, opened the door to this threat: In Georgia, any person can now challenge the registration of any voter; county boards of election must investigate all of these challenges; and thanks to SB 202, they no longer have the discretion to dismiss frivolous ones before an investigation takes place.
These ongoing challenges come at a pivotal moment for election officials. Instead of readying and steadying themselves for November, they must now also handle a campaign of complaints and efforts to relitigate the 2020 presidential contest, sowing chaos in the process.
For Stacey Abrams, the Democratic gubernatorial candidate reprising her 2018 governor’s race matchup against Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, a former secretary of state, voter challenges are one of the building blocks of election subversion. For the besieged, underfunded county boards of elections, she has argued, a voter challenge amounts to election subversion since it is “a predicate for challenging whether those ballots can actually be counted.”
When Georgia’s Republican lawmakers passed the oxymoronic Election Integrity Act, known by the shorthand SB 202, in the aftermath of 2020’s election chicanery, their intentions were anything but benign and their takeaway from 2020 was clear: It was African Americans and other historically disenfranchised groups—Latinos, Asians, seniors, and college students—who’d taken took full advantage of the law’s election conveniences. Perhaps even more stunning to those lawmakers was the Election Day revelation of those voters (likely, Democrats) enduring hours-long waits to cast their ballots.
So, Georgia’s Republican legislature took a throwback approach to election administration and wrung out any semblance of post–Jim Crow egalitarianism from voting. They criminalized the distribution of food and water to people waiting in long lines to vote. They dialed back the number of ballot drop boxes and mobile voting vans. They instituted cumbersome documentation requirements for voting by mail, and removed limits on challenges to the rights of individual voters.
Georgia experienced astonishingly high turnout during the May primary, a 168 percent increase over the 2018 gubernatorial primary and a 212 percent increase over the 2020 presidential primary. Those figures led some news outlets to downplay the impact of SB 202. But the reasons for this year’s high primary turnout are complex and tell only so much about voter behavior. An analysis of the primary results by the Brennan Center for Justice revealed the biggest gap between Black and white turnout rates, with the exception of 2020, in at least a decade.
Georgia’s Republican legislature took a throwback approach to election administration and wrung out any semblance of post–Jim Crow egalitarianism from voting.
“It’s hard to say whether or not the new omnibus bill in Georgia is causing the turnout gap to grow or be bigger; it’s probably a contributing factor but not a determinative one,” says Kevin Morris, the quantitative researcher for the Brennan Center Democracy Program who wrote the report. “What is key is that racial gaps in turnout persist regardless: Even with Barack Obama at the top of the Democratic ticket in 2008 and 2012, Black turnout surpassed white “just barely,” Morris says.
Georgia’s county elections boards have morphed from fairly independent offices to functionally undemocratic ones, tethered to a secretary of state who is no longer independent. The secretary no longer chairs the State Elections Board and does not have a vote. The Republican-majority General Assembly now chooses the State Elections Board chairperson, leaving the county boards at the mercy of a partisan state official. More ominously, the State Elections Board can remove the head of a county elections board and take over the board. But the state board can only take over four of the 159 county election boards at any one time in the case of disputes—raising the possibility that the counties whose boards it might take over in such cases could be the most heavily Democratic ones (like Fulton County, home to Atlanta).
Abrams notes that other key concerns are the removal of Black election officials from county election boards, which happened in four of the state’s counties. Another arena for mischief involves the distribution and handling and new regulations regarding provisional ballots, always a complex undertaking that is often inscrutable to voters and subject to whims of poll workers and county officials.
“It’s important for us to frame election subversion, not simply in the traditional high-drama situation that we saw in … 2020, but in the very strategic attempt to undermine voters at every stage,” she said Monday in response to a question from the Prospect at a National Association of Black Journalists Political Task Force forum. “So that when you get to the counting of the ballots, you’ve already subverted the election.”
A number of groups and individuals seeking to suppress the vote have fanned out across the state, often even showing up at people’s homes. Aunna Dennis, the executive director of Common Cause Georgia, describes them as “pop-up, overnight groups” looking to challenge the registrations of voters who live in nontraditional settings like homeless shelters or student group homes. These challengers, she says, are still believers in the myth of mass fraud and vote-tampering in the last presidential contest. Common Cause is also working to determine if these groups are profiling people based on their last names or other racial or ethnic factors.
According to Bloomberg, about two-thirds of the challenges offered up by VoterGA, a third-party group affiliated with President Trump and Michael Flynn (his former national-security adviser) have been rejected by county officials or withdrawn by the group.
Individuals are also approaching county boards. In DeKalb County, one resident submitted a list of more than 1,000 people for election officials’ review. The challenge was thrown out.
One question prompted by the challenge phenomenon is whether the ensuing purges run up against the National Voter Registration Act, which prohibits voter purges 90 days before a federal election. ACLU of Georgia has made this point, as well as asserting that these challengers have failed to meet certain state law requirements.
“The trouble is SB 202, which not only burdened counties by these challenges, but also puts counties under this threat of state takeover if they don’t do their job right,” says Sean Morales-Doyle, the Brennan Center’s Voting Rights Program director. “Counties feel this pressure to take challenges seriously when some of these challenges are frivolous on their face.”
Taken together, voter suppression and election subversion is a two-headed hydra posing different threats to the voting ecosystem. It may be nonsensical at this juncture to proclaim that one is worse than the other, since their ultimate aim is to undermine the will of the voters and threaten the foundations of democracy in America. The ACLU noted that in their recent county election board meeting, Gwinnett officials said they are concerned that such challenges may be filed right up until Election Day.
