Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffesperger
September 14, 2020

SECRETARY OF STATE DEMANDS THE ACLU TO RELEASE DATA & ABANDON PALAST’S DISINFORMATION CAMPAIGN

Despite assurances it would do so, the American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia has yet to turn over data to the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office that it used to claim that, in 2019, the state wrongly canceled the registrations of “198,351 Georgia voters who supposedly moved from their registration addresses who, in fact, have not moved at all.” The ACLU hired the Palast Investigative Fund to assert that “63 percent error rate” among the 313,243 voter registrations that were canceled overall because the voter no longer lived at the listed address.

“If these claims were anywhere near true, there would have been an uprising when our office took the unprecedented step of releasing the names of people who were subject to removal, but there wasn’t,” said Jordan Fuchs, the deputy secretary of state. “Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger is committed to protecting the rights of every eligible Georgia voter, so we’re simply asking that the ACLU turn over its evidence for our office to investigate or retract the report. At this point, Georgians have heard repeated reports of leprechauns and unicorns, but no one can show them photos. There’s a reason for that.”

The Palast study says it used a vendor licensed by the U.S. Postal Service to check voters’ registered addresses against the Postal Services records to arrive at these numbers.

“The Secretary of State’s Office uses a licensed, respected vendor for the same purpose,” Fuchs said. “There are numerous safeguards in place to ensure that no one is wrongly removed. Anyone who bothered to check those 198,000 addresses would give up because they’d find the people they’re searching for no longer live there.”

Voters are contacted numerous times at their address of record before their registrations are canceled. People who move within their county and those who change their address on their driver’s licenses are automatically updated in our system. To stay active, all they have to do is return the postcard, contact an elections official or go vote. No one who has voted since 2015 was removed from the list in 2019, and anyone can check their registration at the Georgia My Voter page to check their status or re-register.

“Groups on the left have continuously spread disinformation about Georgia’s election procedures in order to motivate their bases and solicit money off the outrage they spur,” Fuchs said. “But they also undermine faith in our democratic process and divide Georgians, and to that under false pretenses is shameful. I expected better from the ACLU.”

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ACLU of Georgia
September 1, 2020

The ACLU of Georgia Releases the Palast Investigative Fund Report

The State Likely Removed Nearly 200,000 Citizens from the Voter Rolls Who Never Moved

ATLANTA –  Today, the ACLU of Georgia released a report by the Palast Investigative Fund titled Georgia Voter Roll Purge Errors that concluded the State had likely removed in 2019 the voter registrations of nearly 200,000 Georgia citizens on the grounds that they had moved from the address on their voter registration application. However, none of these citizens had moved, according to Advanced Address List Hygiene. Unsurprisingly, the state’s removals will likely affect the most vulnerable: young voters, voters of lower income, and citizens of racial groups that have been denied their sacred right to vote in the past. Members of the Georgia General Assembly must rectify this egregious error.

Ms. Christine Jordan, a 92-year old Georgia voter and cousin to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., went to the polls in 2018, only to find that her voter registration had been removed from the State's rolls. She had voted every year since 1968.

The National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) of 1993 makes such purges voluntary for each state. According to the NVRA, a state “may” establish a voter removal program “under which change-of-address information supplied by the Postal Service through its licensees is used to identify registrants whose addresses may have changed.”

In addition to its Postal Service licensee, who accessed the deep history files of the Postal Service – a process required by the Post Office for commercial enterprises such as Amazon and eBay, the Palast Investigative Fund hired the top five expert firms in address verification to scrutinize the list, name-by-name.  To do so, they applied Advanced Address List Hygiene, the industry standard for residential address verification, calling on over 240 data sources.

Applying this standard methodology, the Fund found that of the 313,243 Georgia voters who supposedly moved from their registration addresses, 198,351 had not moved. Yet, the State removed their voter registrations.

“One likely source of state error: 3 of 4 voters cancelled who were marked ‘NCOA’ by the Secretary are, in fact, not on the NCOA (National Change-of-Address) list,” the report states. “The fee for the postal and proprietary data bases runs about 5¢ per address—versus a postcard, printed, mailed, postage-paid return plus processing for half a million cards that can run into the millions of dollars – to obtain substantially inaccurate results.”

“There are tens of thousands of Georgia voters who have registered, properly maintained a residence in the same county, and nevertheless have had their registration deleted by the state of Georgia,” said Andrea Young, executive director of the ACLU of Georgia. “We encourage everyone to check their voter status. Many people on this State’s list have every right to assume they are registered to vote. We want you to have time to re-register.”

"The results of our investigation are breathtaking and heartbreaking:  198,000 Georgia citizens wrongly purged from voter rolls—using a system which tends to target younger voters and voters of color.  The state claims these voters moved, but the nation’s top experts in address verification say they haven’t," said journalist Greg Palast, who directed the investigation. "We cannot imagine where the Secretary of State got his 'mover' list.  But we do know, from our name-by-name review by our experts, the same ones used by Amazon and Home Depot, licensed by the Post Office, that 3 out of 4 names the Secretary of State claims are on the Post Office’s change-of-address registry are not on the Post Office list."

To allow these citizens who were likely to have been wrongly removed to re-register and restore their ability to vote, the Palast Investigative Fund has created a website where Georgians can look up to see if they are on the purge list at SaveMyVote2020.org.

Following the election, the ACLU of Georgia will work to ensure that the State uses a more accurate list hygiene system that preserves the sacred right to vote for every citizen.

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