More than 100,000 Georgians will be removed from the voter rolls this summer unless swift action is taken to verify their registration.
Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger made public on Friday evening the list of people who are at risk of having their voter registration canceled soon. In his announcement, Raffensperger said these cancellations were necessary to "ensure the state's voter files are up to date."
Georgia has a history of bulk voter registration removals that have been decried by voting rights advocates. Critics say this latest mass clean-up is yet another attempt to purge eligible voters from the rolls.
Voter registration cancellations occur every other year in Georgia, as required by state law, to remove ineligible or inactive voters and maintain the accuracy of the state's voter rolls.
This round identified 101,789 "obsolete and outdated" voter files, accounting for 1.3 percent of Georgia's 7.8 million total voters. Two-thirds of these voter files (67,286 people total) showed a change of address form was submitted to the Postal Service. The other third (34,227 people total) had election mail returned. Just 267 voters are scheduled for removal because they haven't had contact with election officials for at least five years.
Georgia's four most populous counties — Fulton, Cobb, Gwinnett and DeKalb — have the highest number of voters scheduled for removal. Part of the Atlanta metro area, these four counties have significantly large Black and Democratic populations. In last year's general election, Joe Biden won each county by double-digit margins, ranging from 14 to 67 percentage points.
Georgia election officials will soon notify these voters of their impending removal. Voters will have 40 days to respond to keep their registration status active. If they miss that deadline, they will need to re-register in order to cast a ballot in any future election.
An additional 18,486 voters were removed from the rolls last month because they are deceased. The secretary of state's office confirmed none of these voters cast a ballot in the 2020 general election or Georgia's Senate runoffs in January.
"Making sure Georgia's voter rolls are up to date is key to ensuring the integrity of our elections," Raffensperger said in his Friday announcement. "That is why I fought and beat Stacey Abrams in court in 2019 to remove nearly 300,000 obsolete voter files before the November election, and will do so again this year. Bottom line, there is no legitimate reason to keep ineligible voters on the rolls."
In 2019, the last time the voter rolls were cleaned up, election officials removed 287,000 Georgians from the rolls. Fair Fight Action, a Georgia-based voting rights group founded by Abrams, sued the state for doing so. A federal judge rejected this effort to stop the mass cancellation, but the lawsuit did result in Raffensperger's office reinstating 22,000 voter registrations that were marked for removal due to inactivity.
"The last time Secretary Raffensperger conducted a massive voter purge, he was forced to admit 22,000 errors — 22,000 Georgia voters who would have been kicked off the rolls were it not for Fair Fight Action's diligence. We'll be reviewing the list thoroughly and reaching out to impacted voters," Lauren Groh-Wargo, CEO of Fair Fight Action, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Georgia's largest cancellation to date occurred in 2017 when more than half a million voters were eliminated from the rolls.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.