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This round identified 101,789 "obsolete and outdated" voter files, accounting for 1.3 percent of Georgia's 7.8 million total voters.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.
A golden tray sits on the Resolute Desk as President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement on American nuclear innovation in the Oval Office at the White House on July 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Trump is signing multiple executive orders targeting the nuclear energy sector and easing rules for new reactors and nuclear fuel supply chains.
Trump’s hubris rivals the fallen heroes of ancient Greek mythology
In January, the New York Times asked President Donald Trump if there were any limits on his global powers.
“Yeah,” the president responded, “there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
That was eight months ago, but fortunately Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey” has made ancient Greek literature newly relevant. Before that window closes, I’d like to talk about hubris.
Today, the term mostly means excessive pride or arrogance. That’s part of what the Greeks meant by it too, but the meaning was a bit richer and more specific. Hubris was an insolent or outrageous act that offended the gods, often because the transgressor was claiming abilities or authorities that solely belonged to supreme beings.
Nolan renamed and slightly modified the concept of xenia for the film, calling it “Zeus’ law.” In the director’s telling, mortals should follow the rules laid out by the gods, specifically the requirement to treat strangers with respect lest they be gods in disguise.
In a sense, hubris is the opposite, or at least the rejection, of xenia. The hubris of the suitors, and at times Odysseus himself, invites punishment by the gods and their mortal instruments.
Which brings me back to Donald Trump. His claim that there are no constraints on his personal power to dictate events on the global stage was one of the greatest expressions of hubris ever uttered by a political leader.
Trump’s claim was obviously false when he made it.
He vowed that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. He’s proved powerless to make that happen. If he had divine powers to work his will, why would he have balked at implementing his tariffs so often that Wall Street adopted the “TACO trade” term for his deals? “TACO” stands for “Trump always chickens out.”
And why would Trump have made so many embarrassing concessions to China — from rescinding tariffs on Chinese goods to allowing them to buy crucial and incredibly valuable computer chips?
But Trump saw his success at capturing Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro as proof of his ability to launch missiles to the same effect as Zeus’ lightning bolts. Trump believed he was the most powerful man who ever lived.
This is no exaggeration. In March, when the Iran invasion seemed successful, Trump gave a document penned by“Presidential Historian David King” to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan purporting to prove that Trump was “the most powerful person to have EVER walked this planet.” King was, in fact, a businessman and occasional caddy for legendary golfer Gary Player.
King compared Trump favorably to many of history’s most powerful, and often heinous, figures: Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao Tse Tung, Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin. Many of these men thought they were the most powerful person in the world, too. And many were defeated precisely because they believed it.
At least Napoleon and Hitler had a string of truly impressive victories before they learned the folly of hubris. The limits on Trump’s power have been exposed by far less august forces than the combined might of the allies in World War II or the fearsome Russian winter.
Iran is a comparatively middling power. But the regime’s ability to absorb punishment while imposing its will on the Strait of Hormuz has proved to be a greater constraint on Trump’s power than his morality or mind. We should note that, at least rhetorically, his morality has not proved much of a constraint. He has repeatedly promised to destroy Iranian “civilization” if the regime refuses to capitulate.
But they haven’t — and won’t anytime soon — because the regime’s tolerance for pain far outstrips Trump’s. The combined fear of skyrocketing oil prices, outrage of Gulf state potentates, diminishing weapon supplies and domestic unpopularity is doing the work that international law, congressional oversight and the collective opinion of foreign policy experts can’t or won’t do.
If I considered Trump more heroic than reason and facts could allow, I would say his Sisyphean predicament has the whiff of Greek tragedy to it. Trump is vexed by the fact that the Iranians won’t honor deals or ratify his countless premature claims of victory — giving new meaning to his vow that his presidency would make people tired of winning. It’s almost like they’re out-Trumping Trump.
Things might have gone better if he’d heeded that great Greek tragedian Sophocles: “For Zeus utterly abhors the boasts of a proud tongue.”
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Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.