A federal lawsuit accuses Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp on Wednesday of disenfranchising thousands of minorities ahead of the presidential election, alleging that the state’s “strict matching” requirement for information on registration forms blocked them from voter rolls.
The Republican Kemp’s office called it an unwarranted attack by liberal groups.
Black, Latino and Asian American applicants were far more likely than whites to be rejected due to mismatches with state and federal databases, the suit said, disproportionately affecting minority voters across the state and violating the federal Voting Rights Act.
In all, the state denied 34,874 registration applications from 2013 to 2016 due to mismatched information. Of those, black applicants were eight times more likely to fail the state’s verification process than white applicants; Latinos were more than seven times more likely to fail; and Asian-Americans more than six times more likely, according to the suit.
“These are not small effects we’re talking about,” said Michelle Kanter Cohen, the election counsel for the Washington-based nonprofit Project Vote. “The numbers are staggering.”
The accusations in the lawsuit were strongly denied by Kemp, who has traveled the state to tout the accessibility of Georgia’s elections. His spokeswoman, Candice Broce, said that “the verification process Georgia currently uses was pre-cleared by the U.S. Department of Justice in 2010.”
“This lawsuit,” Broce said, “is an effort by liberal groups to disrupt voter registration just weeks before November’s important election.”
The Georgia NAACP, the Georgia Coalition for the Peoples’ Agenda and the legal nonprofit Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Atlanta brought the suit, and are being helped by the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and Project Vote among other national voting advocacy groups.
Georgia uses a voter registration process that requires all of the letters and numbers comprising an applicant’s name, date of birth, driver’s license number and last four digits of their Social Security number to exactly match the same letters and numbers for the applicant on the state’s Department of Drivers Service or federal Social Security Administration databases.
If a single letter, number, hyphen, space or apostrophe is out of place and if the applicant fails to correct the mismatch within 40 days of being notified of the problem, the application is automatically cancelled and the applicant is not placed on the registration rolls.
According to the lawsuit, the 34,874 number represents the total number of denied applications in the state between July 2013 to July 2016. Among the denied applicants, the suit said, “approximately 63.6 percent identify as black, 7.9 percent identify as Latino, 4.8 percent identify as Asian-American and 13.6 percent identify as white.”
The lawsuit comes less than a week before early voting starts in Georgia’s presidential election. Local counties begin Tuesday to mail out absentee ballots to voters who requested them. The state’s voter registration deadline ahead of the election is Oct. 11.