Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

Purging or maintenance? 100,000 Georgia voters to be removed from the rolls.

Georgia voter stickers

More than 100,000 Georgians are marked for removal from the voter rolls later this summer.

Megan Varner/Getty Images

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This round identified 101,789 "obsolete and outdated" voter files, accounting for 1.3 percent of Georgia's 7.8 million total voters.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.

Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter

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.

Read More

The Evolving Social Contract: From Common Good to Contemporary Practice

An illustration of hands putting together a puzzle.

Getty Images, cienpies

The Evolving Social Contract: From Common Good to Contemporary Practice

The concept of the common good in American society has undergone a remarkable transformation since the nation's founding. What began as a clear, if contested, vision of collective welfare has splintered into something far more complex and individualistic. This shift reflects changing times and a fundamental reimagining of what we owe each other as citizens and human beings.

The nation’s progenitors wrestled with this very question. They drew heavily from Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who saw the social contract as a sacred covenant between citizens and their government. But they also pulled from deeper wells—the Puritan concept of the covenant community, the classical Republican tradition of civic virtue, and the Christian ideal of serving one's neighbor. These threads wove into something uniquely American: a vision of the common good that balances individual liberty with collective responsibility.

Keep ReadingShow less
We’ve Collectively Created the Federal Education Collapse

Students in a classroom.

Getty Images, Maskot

We’ve Collectively Created the Federal Education Collapse

“If we make money the object of man-training, we shall develop money-makers but not necessarily men.” - W.E.B. Du Bois

The current state of public education has many confused, anxious, and even fearful. Depending on the day, I feel any combination of the above, among other less-than-ideal adjectives. Simply, the future is uncertain. Schools are simultaneously cutting budgets and trying to remain relevant, all during an increasingly tense political climate.

Keep ReadingShow less
Recent Republican policies and proposals limiting legal immigration and legal immigrants' benefits and rights

An oversized gavel surrounded by people.

Getty Images, J Studios

Recent Republican policies and proposals limiting legal immigration and legal immigrants' benefits and rights

In a recent post we quoted a journalist describing the Republican Party as anti-immigration. Many of our readers wrote back angrily to say that the Republican party is only opposed to immigrants who are present illegally.

But that's not true. And we're not shy of telling it like it is.

Keep ReadingShow less
The Importance of Respecting Court Orders
brown wooden chess piece on brown book

The Importance of Respecting Court Orders

The most important question in American politics today is whether Donald Trump will respect court orders. Judges have repeatedly ruled against his administration.

But will he listen?

Keep ReadingShow less