A national conservative group is attracting reproach from an unusual combination of state and local election officials, along with the ACLU of Georgia, after it sent letters to six rural counties questioning the legality of their voter rolls, and threatening a lawsuit if they don’t respond.
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“If you are not maintaining your records to the best of your ability, on a regular basis, you are essentially inviting a whole variety of bad scenarios in, and voter fraud is one,” said Logan Churchwell with the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PLIF), the group that sent the letters.
PLIF sent letters to nearly 250 counties around the country, claiming many have more registered voters than adult residents.
There’s nothing inherently illegal about that. It can take years for someone to be removed from the voter rolls, unless there’s clear evidence they moved or died.
“State and federal laws place time and procedural limitations on list maintenance activities. This necessarily creates a delay in the list maintenance process that will result in larger voter rolls,” said Jessica Simmons, chief-of-staff in Georgia’s Secretary of State, which draws frequent criticism from voting rights groups.
“Georgia county registrars do an excellent job at ensuring the voter rolls are accurate and conduct list maintenance in accordance with various laws,” Simmons said.
There are benefits to cleaning up voter rolls, said Sean Young, with the Georgia ACLU, but conservative groups like the PLIF are trying to make voting more difficult for people with low incomes and people of color.
The PLIF targets rural counties with few resources to respond to their requests, Young said.
“Some of these letters result in consent decrees where the county is bullied into agreeing to take people off the rolls, potentially in violation of federal law,” Young said.
Oconee, Marion, Lee, Fayette, Bryan and McIntosh counties got letters. All of those counties voted for President Donald Trump in 2016, and most did so by wide margins.
“If we were trying to harm minority voters, we would be talking to the wrong counties,” Churchwell said.
This isn’t the first time McIntosh County’s voter rolls have been questioned by a conservative, out-of-state group, said Robert John Mucha, the county’s board of elections chair.
“These organizations are just duplicating effort in my estimation, creating a lot of double work for people who are trying to keep these rolls straight,” Mucha said.
