Now that Donald Trump’s baseless lies about voter fraud have been summarily dismissed by the courts, perhaps some attention can be paid to the true threat to free and fair elections: systemic and massive voter suppression.
Voter suppression, not voter fraud, could have critically important effects in Senate runoff elections in Georgia that will determine which party controls the majority in the U.S. Senate.
In Georgia, voting rights groups, including the Rainbow Push Coalition and the Black Votes Matter Fund, have filed a lawsuit challenging the wrongful purge of nearly 200,000 voters from the voting rolls over the last two years. They are seeking, with the aid of counsel provided by the National Bar Association, injunctive relief to reinstate these voters prior to the Jan. 5 Senate runoff races.
As a September report from the Georgia American Civil Liberties Union states, the voters purged are likely to be “young voters, voters of lower income and citizens of racial groups that have been denied their sacred right to vote in the past.”
With Republicans in control of the state, it isn’t surprising that these are voters who are likely to vote overwhelmingly for Democrats. Nor is it surprising that the state chose not to use a licensee of the U.S. Postal Service — as required by law — to carry out the mailing designed to confirm that the voters were no longer at the address. Instead, it was done by a one-person firm located in Nebraska.
An independent analysis of over 300,000 voters purged from the rolls after 2018 showed that over 60% wrongfully lost their right to vote because of an incorrect assumption that they had changed their address. Too often, these voters never discover they have been purged until the time to vote, when it is too late.
Georgia and its long history of voter suppression – Chicago Sun-Times