In Whitfield County, confusion, frustration over exact match voting law

Voters cast their ballots at the Chickamauga Civic Center on Tuesday, May 22, 2018, in Chickamauga, Ga. Turnout was steady at the polling place for Georgia's Tuesday primary election.
Voters cast their ballots at the Chickamauga Civic Center on Tuesday, May 22, 2018, in Chickamauga, Ga. Turnout was steady at the polling place for Georgia's Tuesday primary election.

DALTON, Ga. - After waiting two months for his voter identification card, the Rev. David Gonzalez-Gutierrez visited the Whitfield County Board of Elections this month.

He registered to vote in the summer, immediately after his citizenship ceremony in Atlanta. A government worker said a card would come in the mail, a signal that the state processed his application. But when he checked his status, the elections office told him there was a problem.

His last name on his voter application didn't exactly match his last name in the Georgia Department of Driver's Services database. The specific issue? A hyphen appears in one and not the other.

Gonzalez-Gutierrez, 48, a Guatemalan immigrant and the pastor of Iglesia Evangélica De Santidad in Dalton, does not know who made the small mistake: himself or a government worker. But the local elections office assured him someone would fix the error before Election Day, Nov. 6.

"I don't know how to correct that or who is going to correct that," he said Friday.

Gonzalez-Gutierrez and 53,000 other people are in a pending voter status under Georgia's exact match law, which requires elections officials to cross-reference voter applications with driver's services and Social Security Administration databases. Any name, date of birth, driver's license number or Social Security number that doesn't match puts the application on hold until the voter and the elections worker can identify and fix the problem.

Since the Associated Press first reported about this practice earlier this month, misinformation about the specifics has spread, sometimes in news articles. These voters can still cast ballots if they bring a driver's license or state ID card. At the polls, elections workers can review the problem with a voter and potentially fix it overnight. Meanwhile, voters can cast provisional ballots - with the understanding that the state will count their vote once the problem is rectified.

But even with the state addressing these issues, the quirks of the law can create confusion. And the confusion can dissuade inexperienced voters. Gonzalez-Gutierrez originally thought he could not vote because he had not received his card from the secretary of state's office.

Mindy Resendiz Cervantes, 29, also of Dalton, feels the same way. She said she registered to vote after her citizenship ceremony this summer. The person who helped her told her to expect a voter identification card within six weeks. (A card is not required to vote.)

But the state flagged Resendiz Cervantes' application because something didn't match her profile in the Social Security Administration database. Without her card, she figured she wasn't eligible to vote until a reporter interviewed her last week.

Resendiz Cervantes did not know about the exact match law. Though the county election's office is supposed to send every pending voter a letter explaining that there is a discrepancy in their application, she does not recall receiving any notice. (Of the eight pending voters the Times Free Press interviewed for this story - all of them Latino voters in Dalton - none remember receiving notice about their pending status.)

"When I registered in Atlanta, the people told me, 'It's OK. Everything is OK. Wait maybe six weeks,'" she said. "Now, I know the vote is in November. But I don't have the card."

Racial discrimination charges

The fight over the exact match law is a flash point in Georgia's governor race. Secretary of State Brian Kemp, the Republican candidate, says the law is vital to election integrity. He blames confusion in the database on sloppy voter registrations. But Democrat Stacey Abrams says rules like these suppress minority voters.

While accounting for about 31 percent of the state's population, black voters make up 70 percent of the names on pending status.

An analysis of pending voters in North Georgia does not show the same type of discrepancy. But that's probably because there are few black people in the region; the minority represents just 3.8 percent of the population in Catoosa, Chattooga, Dade, Gordon, Murray, Walker and Whitfield counties.

However, there is a substantial Latino population here. And, like black voters statewide, this group is disproportionately represented on the pending voter list. Latinos make up about 14 percent of the population in the area and about 37 percent of the flagged applications. (Whites, who account for 80 percent of the population in the region, represent 46 percent of the applications.)

Of the 143 North Georgia Latino voters flagged, the state said it needs proof of citizenship for 30 of them. In the rest of the cases, the state found discrepancies with the driver's services and social security databases.

America Gruner, president of Coalicion de Lideres Latinos in Dalton, has helped register Latino people to vote here for 12 years. She said the group is vulnerable to slight hiccups under the strict, exact match law.

Like in Gonzalez-Gutierrez's case, a hyphen can put the registration in jeopardy. So can a misplaced accent mark. Or a forgotten accent mark. Or a "z" instead of an "s." Or, with so many people using their mother's and father's last names, one of the two might get bumped into a "middle name" field.

Prospective voters make these mistakes, she said. But so do government workers. The Social Security Administration, the department of driver's services and the elections office all have to enter each name perfectly.

"I see it as another tactic to deter people from voting," she said. "People get discouraged. Or they don't know what they have to do. They think they're not registered."

Abrams made a similar charge during a visit to Dalton on Oct. 19, telling a crowd, "The way voter suppression works is not just physically blocking you from voting. It's bringing a sense of fear among everyone that their vote doesn't matter."

Long, legal history

When he introduced the exact match bill in the House Governmental Affairs Committee, state Rep. Barry Fleming, R-Harlem, said federal law required the change. Opponents counter that interpretation is not exactly true, but the law's roots do extend back to the federal Help America Vote Act of 2002, a sweeping reform in the fallout of the Bush-Gore presidential election.

The law requires states to cross reference voter applications with driver's services and Social Security databases. In fact, according to a court filing by the secretary of state's office, the U.S. Department of Justice told Georgia elections officials in 2007 that they were out of compliance because they hadn't put together a database system. Former Secretary of State Karen Handel then implemented an exact match policy.

Controversy followed when, in October 2008, civil rights groups sued over the policy. The state database had flagged the voter application of a Kennesaw State University student who was Latino. In cross referencing his application to the department of driver's services information, state officials learned the student previously admitted he was not a citizen.

But in the time between getting his driver's license and registering to vote, the student had become a citizen. Federal judges sided with the civil rights groups and - reasoning that the law might affect other, unknown students - temporarily blocked the database's use.

The judges also ruled that the state needed approval from the Department of Justice before making any changes. As part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Georgia and other southern states needed federal approval before tweaking elections procedures. Given their legacies during the Jim Crow era, the states needed to prove that their rules did not discriminate based on race.

A quick review was not promising. Loretta King, the acting assistant attorney general in the Department of Justice's civil rights division, reviewed the applications that the state had flagged through October 2008. She found that black people were 60 percent more likely than white people to be flagged. Latino and Asian people were twice as likely.

Of about 7,000 people marked as non-citizens, King wrote that half actually were citizens.

"These burdens are real, are substantial, and are retrogressive for minority voters," King wrote in a May 2009 letter.

Handel and her successor, Kemp, continued to try to implement exact match. Their attorneys argued that Department of Justice officials were unfair. Under one presidential administration, the state got in trouble for not cross referencing with the other databases. Under another presidential administration, the state was told its use of the databases was racist. Kemp's attorney said the Department of Justice failed to provide real solutions.

In August 2010, after a tug of war in federal court, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder approved of the state's exact match system. It was very similar to what Handel originally implemented. Holder's filing in the case does not offer much of an explanation on why the policy under Kemp was less discriminatory.

In September 2016, civil rights groups sued over Georgia's exact match policy again. An attorney for the NAACP said the state had taken the federal requirement too far. While the law required Georgia elections officials to match a voter application to the other databases, the attorney argued, they didn't have to purge the voters so quickly.

At the time, the state gave a pending voter 30 days to fix any problems. Between 2013-16, according to the lawsuit, about 34,000 people were dropped from the voter rolls because of the policy. The civil rights groups suggested election workers can reasonably fix minor problems, such as a misplaced hyphen, without throwing out an application.

With the lawsuit still active, the Legislature passed a bill that extended the time voters have to fix exact match problems. Voters now are in pending status for 26 months. Kemp and the civil rights groups then settled their lawsuit.

Aftereffects

Conversations about Latino voters often treat the group like a monolith of Democratic voters, a holy grail that can swing tight elections for candidates such as Abrams. But exit polls in the 2016 presidential election showed that about 36 percent of Latino voters favored Donald Trump to Hillary Clinton, a figure that shows a more nuanced picture.

Alejandro Velasquez, 18, who works on the floor of a Shaw Industries plant, said he wasn't sure yet who he would vote for in the governor race. He registered to vote in August but hadn't heard his name was flagged until Friday.

"It doesn't sound right that they're doing this against anybody," he said. "Latinos. Blacks. It's not fair. It's not right. They should let us know or something."

Paula Gonzalez, 18, a Dalton State student, has been following the news about the exact match law but didn't know she was on the list until a reporter contacted her. There was a discrepancy between info in her voter application and the Social Security Administration's database. She's read that election workers should be able to fix these problems easily, and people flagged should be able to vote next week.

Still, exact match runs deeper than the letter of the law, she said. Many Latinos her age were born and raised in Dalton. But their parents immigrated here, and some children were raised in a culture of fear toward the government. Even the act of registering to vote can anger their parents, a daring step of giving the government your name and address.

The slightest threat of pushback from government workers feels discouraging.

"It will have an impact on them to lead them to not vote," she said. "I'm still going to go to vote because I want to. But people who are new voters, they may see it as another obstacle and just rather not try. And that, in turn, just eliminates their vote and their say."

Contact staff writer Tyler Jett at 423-757-6476 or tjett@timesfreepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @LetsJett.

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