Two counties in Georgia will be required to undo a decision that removed more than 4,000 voters from the rolls before the January 5 U.S. Senate runoff elections, a federal judge ruled Monday.
Judge Leslie Abrams Gardner, the sister of former gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, found that the counties seemed to have improperly relied on unverified change-of-address data to invalidate the more than 4,000 registrations in Muscogee County and 150 registrations from Ben Hill County.
President-elect Joe Biden won Muscogee County in November, while President Trump carried Ben Hill County, according to Politico.
Majority Forward, a group led by Democratic Party attorney Marc Elias, filed the suit in response to a challenge to the voter registrations on December 14 after a local voter found that the registrations seemed to match U.S. Postal Service change-of-address records. The voter, Ralph Russell, said he believed that signified that the voters had moved out of Georgia, though Democrats argued that the postal data is not an adequate indicator that a voter has given up their local residence.
“I believe that each of the individuals named … as a result of registering their name and change of address to a location outside of Muscogee County, removed to another state with the intention of making the new state their residence,” Russell told the county board. “Thus, each individual has lost their residence in Muscogee County, and consequently, each individual is ineligible to vote in Muscogee County.”
In a December 16 meeting, the Muscogee board backed Russell’s motion 3-1, though he was not in attendance and offered no additional evidence to back his claims. The board decided voters on the list would have to vote by provisional ballot and present additional evidence of residency to vote.
The Ben Hill County board voted 2-1 to endorse a challenge launched by Tommy Roberts, a City Council member in Fitzgerald, Ga., whose claims relied on similar change-of-address data.
Gardner found the voter removals appeared to violate federal law as voters were not given adequate notice and because they fall under the type of systematic voter roll purging that is not allowed within 90 days of a federal election, she wrote in her 11-page ruling.
Elias praised the ruling as a “blow to GOP voter suppression.”
“We continue to monitor how other Georgia counties respond to the suppression scheme,” he added. “Where necessary, we will sue and we will win.”
Ahead of Monday night’s ruling, the Muscogee board filed a motion requesting that Gardner recuse herself from the case because of her relationship to Abrams, who is a “Georgia politician and voting rights activist who was the Democratic candidate in the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election and has since engaged in various highly publicized efforts to increase voter registration and turnout for the 2020 general election in Georgia,” lawyers wrote.
However, Gardner declined to recuse herself, writing in her ruling that the court “finds no basis for recusal.”
“An Order detailing the Court’s reasoning is forthcoming,” she wrote.