Crackdowns on potential voter fraud fuel worries
Nine months after President Donald Trump was forced to dissolve a panel charged with investigating voter fraud, GOP officials across the country are cracking down on what they describe as threats to voting integrity — moves that critics see as attempts to keep some Americans from casting ballots in November’s elections.
In Georgia, election officials have suspended more than 50,000 applications to register to vote, most of them for black voters, under a rigorous Republicanbacked law that requires personal information to exactly match driver’s license or Social Security records.
In Texas, the state attorney general has prosecuted nearly three dozen individuals on charges of voter fraud this year, more than the previous five years combined.
And in North Carolina, a U.S. attorney and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) issued subpoenas last month demanding that virtually all voting records in 44 counties be turned over to immigration authorities within weeks — a move that was delayed after objections from state election officials.
Voting rights advocates said Republicans are seizing on sporadic voting problems in an effort to disenfranchise voters of color.
In Georgia, several of these groups filed a lawsuit Thursday seeking to block the “exact match” registration law passed last year.
“The myth of voter fraud is used by those who wish to curtail the right to vote of specific populations, usually minority voters,” said Ezra Rosenberg, an attorney for the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a participant in the suit.
“Instead of thinking up schemes to stop people from voting, we should be doing everything in our power to make it easier for people to vote,” he added.
Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp, who enforces state election laws and is also the GOP gubernatorial nominee, said the focus on the suspended voter registrations is a crisis manufactured by his Democratic opponent.
“While outside agitators disparage this office and falsely attack us, we have kept our heads down and remained focused on ensuring secure, accessible, and fair elections for all voters,” he said in a statement last week in which he touted Georgia’s record number of registered voters.
Numerous studies have found no evidence of largescale voter fraud in the United States. But the specter of fraud was raised repeatedly by Trump after the 2016 election, when he claimed without evidence that millions of undocumented immigrants voted illegally for his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton.In Georgia, the issue is inflaming an already hard-fought governor’s race, where Kemp is battling against Democrat Stacey Abrams, who would be the first female black governor.
The Associated Press reported last week that 53,000 voter registrations in the state are on hold under the “exact match” verification process, which requires voter application information to precisely mirror a resident’s state or federal data on file. Even a hyphen out of place could prompt an application to be flagged by local election officials and suspended.
Nearly 70 percent of the registrations that have been frozen are those of African Americans, according to the AP.
Kemp’s office said the reason so many black voters have had their registrations held up is because they were signed up to vote by the New Georgia Project, a voter registration campaign founded by Abrams that Kemp accused of filing sloppy, handwritten forms.
Abrams is no longer involved with the group. In a statement, her campaign spokeswoman, Abigail Collazo, said Kemp “is trying to deflect responsibility and deny accountability for the continued use of the exact match program, which is well known to disproportionately impact minority voters. It is clearer than ever that Brian Kemp cannot be trusted to oversee this election.”
Kemp’s office said that all voters whose applications were suspended have received notices about how to contact local officials to rectify their status. All are permitted to vote this November if they bring proper identification that substantially matches their registration.
“This is a publicity stunt that the media falls for year after year,” said Candice Broce, a spokeswoman for the secretary of state, noting that a similar exact match law was recently upheld in Florida by a federal appeals court.
“The 53,000 Georgians cited in their complaint can vote in the November 6th election,” she said. “Any claims to the contrary are politically motivated and utterly false.”
The controversy in North Carolina elicited a more bipartisan uproar, with Republicans and Democrats alike decrying the efforts of Robert Higdon Jr., the U.S. attorney for Eastern District of North Carolina and a Trump appointee, to secure millions of voting records from 44 counties in the eastern half of the state.
The demand for documents came just days after Higdon’s office, in concert with ICE, issued indictments charging 19 foreign nationals of voting illegally in the 2016 elections.
State election officials argued that responding to the subpoenas would require compiling more than 20 million documents and would burden tiny electoral offices while they were already printing ballots and making other preparations for the November elections.
A spokesman for the State Board of Elections said the U.S. attorney agreed to wait until January for the documents.
Higdon’s office declined to answer questions about the subpoenas, citing an active grand-jury investigation. ICE officials also declined to comment.
The demand could cast a chilling effect among voters worried about the privacy of their voting records, state officials said, and frighten naturalized immigrants into wondering about their right to vote.
“The scope is immense. It’s incredible. The amount of information they’re seeking — I’ve never seen anything quite like it,” said Andy Penry, chairman of the state electoral board.
“It would be nice if the proponents would give us some information to justify the breadth and scope of the subpoenas,” said Penry, a Democrat.