Voting rights group files motion to stop Georgia purge

ATLANTA (AP) — A voting rights group founded by Democrat Stacey Abrams filed an emergency motion Monday asking a court to halt Georgia’s planned mass purge of voters.

The motion was filed by Fair Fight Action in U.S. District Court, just hours before the secretary of state’s office planned to begin the purge of inactive voter registrations.

Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in October released a list of over 313,000 voters whose registrations were at risk of being canceled, about 4% of the state’s total registered voters. Those voters were mailed notices in November and had 30 days to respond in order to keep their registration intact.

Walter Jones, a spokesman for the secretary of state’s office, said the purge is planned for overnight Monday into Tuesday. He said the exact number and names of voters removed would not be known until then and that more information would be made available after.

Voter purges in Georgia became a hot-button issue during last year’s race for governor between Abrams and Republican Brian Kemp, who won the race. Kemp served as secretary of state before being elected governor and oversaw aggressive voter purges during his tenure. Over 1.4 million voter registrations were canceled in Georgia between 2012 and 2018.

While some of the people removed from the rolls had either moved or died, others were removed for simply not voting in several election cycles.

“The list of Inactive Voters is composed of people who did not respond to notices sent to them because they had either filed a change of address form with the U.S. Postal Service, had official election mail returned undeliverable or who have not had contact with the election system for three years,” the secretary of state’s office says in an online description of the removal process. “Although these people failed to...