U.S. Justice Dept. Objects to GA’s Voter Registration Rules

Thanks to Ballot Access News and Rick Hasen’s Election Law Blog for this.

On May 29, the U.S. Department of Justice objected to Georgia rules for voter registration that were passed in 2008. GA is one of the states that can’t change its election laws without approval by the Voting Rights Section of the Justice Department.

The 2008 GA rules say that when someone registers to vote, the information on that registration form is matched against Social Security records, and Georgia drivers license records, and if any discrepancy is found, the voter registration is rejected.

The Justice Department letter says that by March 2009, the state had rejected 199,606 registration forms, and that a disproportinate number of the rejected forms are minority ethnic groups. The Justice Department letter cites evidence that the vast majority of rejected voter registration forms were rejected because a single digit was accidentally transposed in a drivers license number, or a Social Security number.

Note that this issue is separate from the 2009 Georgia law that requires newly-registering voters to submit documents proving that they are citizens. The process of obtaining Justice Department approval for that law lies in the future.

The DOJ letter said:

"We have considered the accuracy of the state’s verification process. Our analysis shows that the state’s process does not produce accurate and reliable information and that thousands of citizens who are in fact eligible to vote under Georgia law have been flagged….

An error as simple as transposition of one digit of a driver[s] license can lead to an erroneous notation of a non-match…..

….Although the state has not provided data on the racial and language minority characteristics of all registrants whose applications went through the verification process, we have been able to compare the composition of those persons whom the state has flagged for further inquiry because of a non-match with both the composition of newly registered voters in the state and the composition of existing registered voters….

[A]pplicants who are Hispanic, Asian or African-American are more likely than white applicants, to statistically significant degrees, to be flagged for additional scrutiny…."

Michael H. Drucker
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