Marble Falls Georgia makes just about anyone’s list of battleground states for the November US presidential election, but there’s every indication that it’s a battleground for voters simply trying to get on the voter rolls and then stay on the rolls without being purged either deliberately or through technical sloppiness.
Most recently, reports by the Associated Press as well as ProPublica and local Atlanta news sources found a computer glitch in the Secretary of State’s office. Anyone for any motivation who did the little work involved to get a voter’s name, birthdate, and county of resident could go on the state’s website and remove the voter. Needless to say, the voter would be clueless until she showed up at the polls on election day and found that she was no longer eligible to vote, because she had supposedly removed herself. The person who originally stumbled on this problem, though the office, denies his inquiry. The news outfits even gave the office a couple of days before printing to let them fix the problem, though they were in less of a hurry to respond to that as well. Even after these snafus, the AP team found additional flaws on the website which would also expose voters’ personal information.
For our part, we wonder why the state found it necessary to create a portal for withdrawing your registration in the first place? Shouldn’t it have been the job of the office to help people get on the rolls, not get off?
What the heck is the matter with Georgia?!? The state legislature passed a raft of bills to make it harder for citizens to vote. The election commission’s Republican majority wants to reopen the ballot recounting controversy from the 2020 election. Former President Trump continues to whine that he can’t get a fair vote in Georgia, mainly blaming the Republican governor for his problems, even though it seems increasingly obvious that on one may be able to get a fair vote in the state.
He state already purges regularly, which ACORN’s Voter Purge Project monitors closely. Beginning next week, just as we did in 2020, we are rolling out messages to Georgia voters that they have been purged and linking them to ways that they can re-register or correct any inaccuracy in the list. The emails also allow us to do reminders and assist the process. We’ll be doing this outreach program to purged voters on other critical states as well over August and September to beat the various state registration deadlines.
Maybe Georgia and other states will learn something from these fiascos. Turns out that some folks tried to eliminate the registration of Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene and the governor. Voter purge and voter suppression people need to be careful when some of the two can tango with some of their ill-begotten tools.