ATLANTA (AP) – A federal judge is holding a hearing Monday on Georgia’s planned mass purge of its voting rolls, following an emergency request from a voting rights group founded by Democrat Stacey Abrams.
U.S. District Judge Steve Jones had ruled earlier in the day that the purge should be placed on hold until a Thursday hearing, but he later decided to hold the hearing Monday afternoon.
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. Notices were mailed in November giving those voters 30 days to respond in order to keep their registration intact. A spokesman for the secretary of state’s office said last week that the purge was set to begin Monday evening.
Fair Fight says that over 120,000 people are on the purge list “solely because they have not voted or had any other statutorily-defined ‘contact’ with election officials in the past seven years and have not responded to two notices seeking confirmation of their current address.” The organization says a new law allows voters nine years of inactivity before being removed – compared to seven years under the old law – and are asking that a judge immediately halt the removal of those voters from Georgia’s voting rolls.