Georgia officials push to make tossing out bogus right-wing voter challenges easier

Election officials and lawmakers in Georgia are about to butt heads as the legislature looks to overhaul voting laws in the state where Donald Trump tried to contest the results of the 2020 presidential election.

According to a report from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the focus of new rules will be on challenges to voter eligibility with election officials saying the current rules are going overboard in an effort to root out election fraud.

As it now stands, conservative groups like True the Vote have created excess work for election workers by attempting to invalidate registrations that have not borne fruit after being investigated.

As the Journal-Constitution is reporting, "Since Georgia’s 2021 voting law allowed anyone to challenge the eligibility of an unlimited number of other voters, over 92,000 registrations were contested last year, according to an accounting by the voting organization Fair Fight Action. County election boards upheld about 5,800 of the challenges."

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That has led election officials to complain to the Georgia General Assembly that "workers spent long hours last year evaluating whether voter challenges were justified. In Gwinnett County, workers reviewed a list of 22,000 allegedly invalid voter registrations before the local election board ultimately dismissed all the voter challenges, finding there wasn’t probable cause to move forward because they were primarily based on mailing address records rather than more specific information that a voter had moved."

The report adds, "Even before Georgia’s voting law that passed two years ago, the Texas-based organization True the Vote challenged 364,000 voters in late 2020 and early 2021 before the state’s U.S. Senate runoffs. County election officials threw out almost all the challenges."

You can read more here.