The Independent View: Georgia Unprocessed Voter Registration Forms Lawsuit

By the New Georgia Project (NGP) estimate, some 800,000 Georgians, people of color, voters between the ages of 18 and 29, and unmarried women, what the group calls the 'Rising American Electorate' weren't registered to vote at the beginning of this year.

Since then the group, founded by state Rep. Stacey Abrams, Democratic leader of the Georgia House, says it and 12 partner groups have registered around 116,000 new voters. But earlier this month, NGP complained that the registrations in five counties, all of them surrounding large Democratic strongholds in Atlanta, Columbus and Savannah, had not processed some 40,000 of these registrations. Republican Secretary of State Brian Kemp said the claim is wrong.

Since most of those 40,000 people are likely to be Democrats, the consequences could have a major impact on the election, including the outcome in the tight open-seat Senate contest between Democrat Michelle Nunn and Republican David Perdue. Given the potential for disenfranchisement, the NGP, together with the NAACP, filed suit against Kemp and the county election boards.

Kemp said earlier this year that more than 7,000 of the registrations had problems because they were of deceased citizens, out-of-state zip codes, ineligible felons, and invalid birth certificates.

Ultimately, Kemp's office announced that a review had found less than 1 percent of voter registration forms turned in by the groups, fewer than 100, were actually fraudulent or suspicious. Of those, just 25 were confirmed forgeries, though there was no evidence anyone had planned to use those registrations to cast fraudulent votes.

NGP has settled with DeKalb County, but the lawsuit is going ahead today against Kemp and the other four counties.

What seems to be at issue here are Republican concerns that Georgia is on the verge of going heavily Democratic again, this time not the party of segregationists who mostly fled to the Republican Party in Georgia and throughout the South over the past 40 years but something a good deal more progressive.

Stacey Abrams and other Democrats have asked why it is that 800,000 eligible Georgians aren't registered and worked diligently to do something about it. That's a question everyone nationally should be asking about unregistered citizens across the land. And doing something about it year round, whether there's an election immediately coming up or not.