[The recent transformation of the state’s election laws
explicitly enabled citizens to file unlimited challenges to other
voters’ registrations. Experts warn that election officials’
handling of some of those challenges may clash with federal law.]
[[link removed]]

CLOSE TO 100,000 VOTER REGISTRATIONS WERE CHALLENGED IN GEORGIA —
ALMOST ALL BY JUST SIX RIGHT-WING ACTIVISTS  
[[link removed]]


 

Doug Bock Clark
July 13, 2023
ProPublica
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ The recent transformation of the state’s election laws explicitly
enabled citizens to file unlimited challenges to other voters’
registrations. Experts warn that election officials’ handling of
some of those challenges may clash with federal law. _

Chris Ramsey, of Palmetto, Georgia, was one of nearly 100,000 voters
whose registration was challenged., Cheney Orr for ProPublica

 

_ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign
up for The Big Story newsletter
[[link removed]]
to receive stories like this one in your inbox_.

On March 15, 2022, an email appeared in the inbox of the election
director of Forsyth County, Georgia, with the subject line
“Challenge of Elector’s Eligibility.” A spreadsheet attached to
the email identified 13 people allegedly registered to vote at P.O.
boxes in Forsyth County, a wealthy Republican suburb north of Atlanta.
Georgians are supposed to register at residential addresses, except in
special circumstances. “Please consider this my request that a
hearing be held to determine these voters’ eligibility to vote,”
wrote the challenger, Frank Schneider.

Schneider is a former chief financial officer at multiple companies,
including Jockey International, the underwear maker. His Instagram
page includes pictures of him golfing at exclusive resorts and a dog
peeing on a mailbox with the caption “Woody suspects mail-in voter
fraud” and the hashtag “#maga.” On Truth Social, the social
media platform backed by former president Donald Trump, Schneider’s
posts have questioned the 2020 election results in Forsyth County and
spread content related to QAnon, the conspiracy theory that holds that
the Democratic elite are cannibalistic pedophiles. In January 2023, he
posted an open letter to his U.S. representative-elect encouraging
“hearings to hold perpetrators accountable where evidence exists
that election fraud took place in the 2020 and 2022 elections.”

The March 2022 voter challenges were the first of many from Schneider:
As the year progressed, he submitted seven more batches of challenges,
each one larger than the one previous, growing from 507 voters in
April to nearly 15,800 in October, for a total of over 31,500
challenges.

Vetting Georgia’s voter rolls was once largely the domain of
nonpartisan elections officials. But after the 2020 election, a change
in the law enabled Schneider and other activists to take on a greater
role. Senate Bill 202, which the state’s Republican-controlled
legislature passed in 2021, transformed election laws in response to
“many electors concerned about allegations of rampant voter
fraud,” as the bill stated. Many states allow challenges, but
officials in Georgia and experts say that in the past challengers have
typically had relevant personal knowledge, such as someone submitting
a challenge to remove a dead relative from the rolls. Georgia,
however, is unusual in explicitly allowing citizens unlimited
challenges against anyone in their county.

At first, voting rights groups were vocal about other aspects of SB
202, such as restrictions on absentee ballots, paying less attention
to the 98-page bill’s handful of sentence-length tweaks that
addressed voter challenges. The change to the challenges rule was
“the sleeper element of SB 202,” said Rahul Garabadu, a senior
voting rights attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of
Georgia.

Media outlets have reported on the high number of challenges
[[link removed]]
and numerous cases of voters feeling harassed, impeded or intimidated
[[link removed]]
by being placed into “challenged” status. But the outsized role of
the small group of people making the challenges was less clear.
ProPublica was able to determine that a vast majority of the
challenges since SB 202 became law — about 89,000 of 100,000 —
were submitted by just six right-wing activists, including Schneider.
Another 12 people accounted for most of the rest. (ProPublica obtained
data for all challenges logged in 30 of the state’s 159 counties,
including the 20 most populous.) Of those challenges, roughly 11,100
were successful — at least 2,350 voters were removed from the rolls
and at least 8,700 were placed in a “challenged” or equivalent
status, which can force people to vote with a provisional ballot that
election officials later adjudicate.

Challenges from right-wing activists have proliferated in Georgia
despite strict federal laws governing how voters can be removed from
rolls. That’s in part because state and local election officials
have struggled to figure out how to reconcile SB 202 with federal
protections. This has resulted in counties handling challenges
inconsistently, sometimes in ways that experts warn may have violated
federal law, something they say may have been the case with
Schneider’s March challenges.

In the run-up to the 2022 election, voting rights advocates warned
that some challenges might create insurmountable barriers to people
casting a ballot, such as by removing them from the rolls. But there
were no published accounts of Georgians who ultimately did not cast a
ballot as a result of being challenged. Schneider’s March challenges
did lead to this kind of harm in at least one instance: An unhoused
voter found his removal from the rolls too high a barrier to allow him
to re-register in time to vote.

Schneider would not agree to an interview and did not respond directly
to ProPublica’s written questions. In emails, he stated that
challenges “only are acted upon” if the elections board approves
them and wrote, “I have not been made aware of anyone that
couldn’t vote based on anything submitted, if true.”

Even some voters who managed to remain on the rolls were still forced
by challenges to fight to remain registered. In Fulton County, which
encompasses most of Atlanta, an immunosuppressed cancer patient had to
drive nearly two hours round-trip to a crowded hearing to defend his
right to vote. At the same proceeding, a Black woman likened her
challenge to voter intimidation.

“There is a clear imbalance of power between the individual bringing
the challenges and the county and voters,” said Esosa Osa, the
deputy executive director of Fair Fight Action, a voting rights
advocacy organization. Elections officials and voters, she said,
“currently have very little recourse once challenged, regardless of
the merits of the challenge.”

Some activists have justified their efforts by claiming that people
might exploit flaws in the voter rolls to commit fraud — for
example, by voting under the name of a deceased person still on the
rolls. Officials in multiple counties told ProPublica that they did
not know of any instances of challenges resulting in a successfully
prosecuted case of voter fraud. A spokesperson for the Georgia
secretary of state’s office said it does not track this data.

ProPublica did find that challenges sometimes identified errors in the
voter rolls, which are dauntingly complex databases that are forever
evolving as people register, move, die or otherwise change their
statuses. Many of these corrections would have happened anyway in the
routine maintenance process, officials said and records showed, though
sometimes at a pace slower than if activists submitted challenges.

“If all these challengers are finding is inconsequential errors that
do not affect election results on the whole, but they’re placing
real and harmful burdens on voters, then you have to wonder why
they’re really doing this,” said Derek Clinger, a senior staff
attorney with the State Democracy Research Initiative at the
University of Wisconsin Law School. “It’s doing more harm than
good.”

In 2018, Joseph Riggs, a longtime Forsyth County resident who
identifies as a Democrat, became homeless after struggling with
depression and other mental health challenges and began using a P.O.
box as his permanent mailing address during what would be years of
instability. Still, he made sure to vote in the 2020 presidential
election and wanted to vote in the hotly contested 2022 Georgia senate
race because he viewed its outcome as affecting social policy that
would impact him.

But that spring Riggs received at his P.O. box a two-page letter from
the Forsyth County elections office informing him of Schneider’s
March challenge and asking him either to appear at a board hearing at
9 a.m. on a workday in June or to send in paperwork justifying his
registration at a P.O. box, changing his registration or removing
himself from the rolls. Around the time of the hearing, Riggs was
living in a tent in the woods, within walking distance of the
part-time jobs he was juggling at McDonald’s, Dollar Tree and a gas
station. He worried that attending the hearing would require an
expensive Uber ride and force him to take unpaid time off work. In the
months beforehand, a state election official had also called Riggs to
question him about his registration, he said, making him think
fearfully of news reports of people being arrested for violating
voting laws
[[link removed]].
And he said he did not remember seeing the option to send in
paperwork. Ultimately, he did not contest his removal from the rolls.

Riggs said that after the county elections board removed him, he
doubted that he could re-register because the letter and phone call
led him to believe he now had no valid address. (According to the
secretary of state’s office, unhoused individuals can solve this
challenge by giving a residential address that is the “closest
approximation” of the location they shelter at, such as a street
corner, and then listing a separate mailing address, such as P.O. box.
But Riggs was not provided with this information.)

“I was really angry,” he said. “When you’re homeless, your
vote is the only voice you’ve got.”

Barbara Helm, who identifies as a Democrat, said she did not see the
letter in her P.O. box notifying her of Schneider’s March 2022
challenge against her, as she had been struggling with addiction and
homelessness. Nor did she know at first that she had been removed at
the same June hearing as Riggs was called to, though election workers
sent her another letter announcing her removal. It wasn’t until she
contacted election officials during the in-person early voting period
in October that she learned that she’d been removed from the rolls
and that the window to re-register had closed.

“A lot of people have fought and died for voting rights,” said
Helm. “I didn’t even know” the challengers and board “could do
that to you.”

Helm contacted the local Democratic Party about her plight, and its
officials took up her case — she was mentioned as an example of
voter suppression by Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams
in a debate, though not by name, and her voting difficulties
[[link removed]]
were covered in several news reports. Helm was eventually allowed to
vote with a provisional ballot, which she believed only happened
because of the attention to her case. (A lawyer for the Forsyth County
board, Karen Pachuta, wrote to ProPublica that “the receipt of a
provisional ballot in Forsyth County is not dependent on any
particular person or circumstance receiving media or political
attention.”)

A week after the election, Helm showed up to a board meeting to defend
her provisional ballot and beg for her vote to count. “It kind of
brought tears to my eyes when they approved my ballot,” she said.

Two other voters challenged by Schneider in March 2022 returned
residency affirmations, obtained by ProPublica through records
requests, in which they explained that they traveled throughout the
year as engineers on projects around the nation and used the P.O. box
as their residency address in lieu of a permanent one. The board
rejected the challenges, allowing them to maintain their prior
registrations.

Of Schneider’s initial thirteen challenges from March 2022, eleven
were heard at the hearing that June, with the county election board
upholding five and dismissing six.

In the lead-up to the 2022 election, the Forsyth County board ruled on
about 31,500 challenges from Schneider and another 1,100 from two
other challengers. In total, the board approved over 200 of the most
serious type of challenge that immediately removes a voter from the
rolls, known as “229s” for their section of Georgia code. The
board also approved around 900 “230” challenges, which place
voters into “challenged” status.

Of the 30 counties for which ProPublica reviewed voter challenges,
Forsyth County was the most aggressive in approving them — in ways
that voting rights lawyers warned may violate the National Voter
Registration Act, a federal law regulating how voters can be removed
from voting rolls.

When Joel Natt, the Republican vice chair of the board, sought to
approve Schneider’s challenges against Helm and Riggs at the June
2022 hearing, Democratic board member Anita Tucker asked, “Madam
Chair and Legal, does that violate the NVRA?”

Tucker expressed a number of concerns, according to an audio recording
of the hearing obtained through open records requests. The concerns
centered on whether the removals of Helm and Riggs violated the
NVRA’s prohibition against removing voters in a systematic manner in
the 90 days before a federal election.

In the hearing, Tucker argued that rather than immediately removing
Helm and Riggs, “the best right procedure” was the NVRA’s
process for voters whose residency is in doubt, which allows voters to
remain on the rolls for around four years and protects them against
being unable to re-register in time to vote. Tucker also questioned
whether the batches of challenges — which had grown to encompass
hundreds or thousands of voters, along with PDFs of alleged evidence
of their ineligibility to vote, such as documents matching names to
addresses outside the county — qualified as systematic challenges,
and therefore shouldn’t have been allowed to proceed.

In response to Tucker’s questions, Pachuta, the board’s lawyer,
warned, “There’s not clear case law on that. It could very well
end up in litigation.” The lawyer explained that “there’s
different opinions” on whether the challenges would fall under state
code or the NVRA. She then advised that “because it is so close to
the election, you have to review these items on an individualized
basis.” (The NVRA allows consideration of individualized challenges
during the 90-day protected window.)

Natt had originally motioned to remove Helm, Riggs and another voter
as a block, until the lawyer advised that this could be construed as
systematically processing a mass challenge. So Natt and the
conservative board chair, Barbara Luth, reintroduced them one by one.
Then the conservative board members outvoted Tucker to remove them
from the rolls. Recordings show that the majority continued outvoting
the Democratic minority while approving challenges one by one during
many meetings. The board did summarily dismiss around 28,500
challenges, all from Schneider, because they were made using a
fallible database-matching technique comparing Georgia voter rolls
with the National Change of Address system, which a federal court had
disallowed
[[link removed]] as
systematic.

“I want to be clear that breaking down the challenges” to do them
one by one “is still systematic and likely violating the NVRA,”
said Andrew Garber, a counsel for the Brennan Center for Justice’s
Voting Rights and Elections Program, who had concerns with the quality
of evidence presented and the depth of evaluation.

“The Forsyth board certainly violated the spirit of the NVRA and
likely its letter as well,” said Garabadu, the attorney with the
ACLU of Georgia, which sent a letter to the board
[[link removed]]
warning that its decision at a September meeting to remove voters
within the 90-day window “was made in violation of state and federal
law and we urge you to reverse it.”

Pachuta wrote to ProPublica that “I respectfully disagree with the
suggestion that considering challenges ‘one by one’ is a violation
of the NVRA. Rather, I believe established authority provides that the
NVRA allows removals based on _individualized information_ at any
time.” She noted that the board spent “hours during its meetings
conducting individualized reviews of various data sets to make the
best collective decision(s) it could.”

After a ProPublica reporter described Riggs’ experience, Luth, the
board chair, said that in the future the board might refrain from
removing voters from the registration rolls within the 90-day window
and just put voters under a challenged status, though she emphasized
it would remain a case-by-case decision. “That’s better than
taking them off the rolls,” she said. “That would be where my vote
would go.”

Natt, who had argued forcefully at the hearing to remove Helm and
Riggs from the rolls, called the removals “a mistake” and said,
“We learned from it.” He expressed remorse to ProPublica over
their difficulties voting. “I don’t want voters to feel
burdened,” he said. “It pained me personally.” He emphasized
that the board had been operating with limited guidance from state
election officials and that they had no legal choice but to rule on
the challenges. “We have to respect the challenger,” said Natt,
and “we have to respect the challengee.”

South of the conservative, wealthy suburbs of Forsyth County, in the
county that encompasses the liberal center of Atlanta, challenges were
handled differently by the left-leaning elections board — but still
caused problems for election officials and voters.

By the time Chris Ramsey received a letter requesting him to appear
before the Fulton County board and “defend why the challenge to your
right to vote should not be sustained,” he was six months into a
cancer treatment that had suppressed his immune system. On his
doctor’s advice, he had stopped teaching elementary school and had
people bring him groceries rather than risk interacting with crowds.
But Ramsey felt he had to defend his right to vote. So on a Thursday
morning in March 2023, he braved rush-hour traffic from his home on
the outskirts of Atlanta to downtown, drove in circles looking for
parking, paid $20, trudged three blocks to the meeting and arrived
“extremely exhausted,” he recalled. Still, he was angry enough to
wait nearly two hours so that he could get his turn at the microphone.

“I’m sorry, excuse my voice, I’m battling cancer,” he said
hoarsely. He then proceeded to criticize the Fulton board for
summoning him over a clerical error in his address that he’d
previously tried to fix. But once he more fully understood that the
board had just been following the law that the challenger had invoked,
he suspected the challenger of having political motives. Ramsey, who
identifies as a Democrat, told ProPublica, “I felt that it was a
conservative person trying to make it easier for their politician to
get where they need to be.”

Ramsey had been challenged by Jason Frazier, a member of the planning
commission for the city of Roswell and urban farmer, who has filed
almost 10,000 voter challenges in Fulton County. On a conservative
podcast, Frazier described introducing other activists outside of
Fulton County to the basics of voter roll analysis. He is also a
prominent participant in frequent private conference calls about
policing voter rolls hosted by the Election Integrity Network, a
conservative organization focused on transforming election laws.
During several calls, Frazier gave advice to more than 100 activists
from at least 15 states, according to minutes provided by the watchdog
group Documented.

The vast majority of the challenges handled in the March hearing that
Ramsey attended had been submitted by Frazier, who had challenged
about 1,000 people registered at nonresidential addresses, such as
P.O. boxes or businesses, and another 4,000 people who he claimed
lived at invalid addresses (including one member of the county
elections board), most because they had the wrong directional
component at the end of their street name — e.g., “SE” instead
of “NE.” About a dozen people at the three-hour hearing spoke out
against the challengers and Fulton officials’ handling of the
challenge process. A woman who introduced herself as a survivor of
domestic violence explained her use of a P.O. box as part of her
“extraordinary lengths to try to protect myself and not keep my
address public.” A mother complained about how addressing the
challenge was taking her away from caring for her children.

“I don’t appreciate being collateral damage in this mission to
clean up the voter rolls,” Sara Ketchum said to the board. Ketchum,
who is Black and identifies as liberal, had temporarily moved for work
from Atlanta to Washington, D.C., where she registered for a mailing
address, but then returned to Georgia in time to vote. That D.C.
mailing address became the basis for the challenge against her,
submitted not by Frazier but by another prolific challenger. According
to Georgia law, many people, such as university students, military
personnel and traveling workers, may be legally registered to vote in
one place but have a temporary mailing address while living in
another.

Ketchum told ProPublica that she felt the challenge was a type of
intimidation, given Georgia’s history of white citizens using voter
challenges to suppress the Black vote
[[link removed]].
“It put in perspective that voter suppression is real and it’s
actually happening,” she said.

At the meeting, Frazier defended his challenges. “I’m free labor
trying to help the system to make sure everyone can vote,” he said.
“I’m not trying to suppress anyone. I just want clean voter rolls
for a multitude of reasons,” including to make sure absentee ballots
go to the right address. He insisted that challenges needed to be
processed in a way that “doesn’t hassle anyone” and blamed
election officials for not making it clear that people could have
responded to the challenges in ways that did not include coming to the
hearing in person.

Frazier did not respond to requests for comment or to a list of
detailed questions.

When Frazier himself was challenged in 2022 for being registered to
vote at a business address — he sells vegetables from his farm at
his house — he decried it as a “frivolous retaliatory challenge”
from someone he himself had challenged. The Fulton board did not
approve the challenge against Frazier.

Recently, Fulton’s Republican Party has twice nominated Frazier to
become a member of the county board of elections, which would give him
oversight of its employees and data. But each time the county
commission voted to reject him, with one commissioner criticizing him
for undermining confidence
[[link removed]] in the election’s
office’s work and calling him “not a serious nomination.” At the
end of June, the county GOP sued the board of commissioners
[[link removed]],
seeking to have a judge force the commissioners to appoint Frazier to
the elections board.

A ProPublica analysis suggests that Frazier disproportionately
challenged Democrats. Georgia election data does not track party
affiliation, so officials use primary voting histories as a proxy. Of
the roughly 8,000 challenges by Frazier that ProPublica obtained,
about 800 voters had most recently voted in a Fulton County primary.
Of those, 78% voted in the Democratic race, compared to 67% of voters
across the county. Several other challengers in Fulton County,
including the person who filed the challenge against Ketchum,
challenged more than 90% Democratic primary voters. (In Forsyth
County, the challenges submitted by Schneider show a smaller
disparity: 28% Democratic primary voters, relative to 22% for the
county as a whole.)

Five of the six most prolific challengers identified by ProPublica,
including Frazier, have assisted or been assisted by right-wing
organizations, some leaders of which were involved in efforts to
challenge the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Frazier has been a prominent participant in frequent private
conference calls hosted by the Election Integrity Network, dispensing
advice about how to police voter rolls to more than a hundred
activists from Georgia and other states. In Gwinnett County, a trio of
challengers associated with VoterGA, an organization with a stated
mission of “working to restore election integrity,” needed dollies
to wheel eight cardboard boxes loaded with tens of thousands of
affidavits into the election office. Another Gwinnett County
challenger targeted about 10,500 registrations using data provided by
Look Ahead America, a conservative organization that offered data and
guides for a “Ballot Challenge Program” in battleground states.

In response to questions, Look Ahead America released a statement
[[link removed]]
describing how it “provided thousands of volunteers across ten
states” with guidance on how to properly submit voter challenges. It
also described itself as “a nonpartisan, nonprofit foundation.”
Garland Favorito, the co-founder of VoterGA, did not answer
ProPublica’s questions about Georgians working with the organization
on their challenges and its leadership’s involvement in disputing
the 2020 presidential election results. When pressed for comment, he
only responded, “Yes it is a provably false blatant lie.” He
declined to elaborate. The Election Integrity Network did not respond
to detailed questions.

Fulton County removed the most voters from its rolls of any county
that ProPublica examined — roughly 1,700 — but did so mostly
during the first half of 2022 when the challenges began, before
switching course. Cathy Woolard, the board chair at the time,
explained to ProPublica that it had made the removals while taking
advice from a county lawyer and that removals were “compliant with
the law.” After hiring a special counsel with more experience,
however, the board switched to placing voters in “challenged”
status rather than removing them, in order to “minimally impact the
voter” during the 90-day protected window. (The challenges were then
resolved after the election.) If Forsyth County’s board had handled
challenges in this way, Helm and Riggs would not have had their
difficulties voting. “Fulton County’s objective is to make certain
that anyone who is able to vote gets an opportunity to vote,” said
Patrise Perkins-Hooker, the special counsel who became board chair on
July 1. “We prioritized the right to vote for each of our citizens
and protected that through the challenge process.”

Nadine Williams, the elections director for Fulton County, said in an
email to ProPublica that the challenges had “significantly”
impacted her workers “due to the short turnaround time to complete
the challenge process.” (SB 202 requires that challenges that place
voters in “challenged status” be considered “immediately” by
the board and that hearings for challenges that remove people from the
rolls be held within roughly a month of being filed.) Officials from
multiple counties described processing the challenges as not just time
consuming but also expensive, due to the extra demands on staff and
the need to hold additional public hearings and send thousands of
mailers, plus hire lawyers and technology consultants.

“If this was actually fixing something or finding criminal activity,
it might be worth it. But it’s harassing other citizens, distracting
us from important work and not achieving the desired result,”
Woolard said. Challenges, she said, have “supplanted our priorities
with the priorities of a very small group of people who did these
challenges.”

Despite requests from some counties for clearer direction, state
officials have issued limited guidance
[[link removed]]
for how counties should handle challenges, mostly advising them to
rely on their attorneys.

Zach Manifold, the head of elections for Gwinnett County, said that
“counties are out there on their own trying to figure out” the
potential discrepancies between state and federal law regarding voter
challenges. Gwinnett is Georgia’s second most populous county and
had the most challenges of any of the 30 counties ProPublica examined.
Almost all of them were dismissed for inadequate evidence.

The lack of direction, the overwhelming volume of challenges and the
complicated intersection between SB 202 and the National Voter
Registration Act have resulted in boards handling challenges in
divergent ways and with different impacts on voters — as evidenced
by Forsyth and Fulton counties.

Among Georgia election officials, a sense has been growing that
something needs to be done about the challenges. About a week before
the 2022 election, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said
that “we need some reform” on the challenge provision to
“tighten that up” due to impacts on election officials, and he
suggested that the legislature could change the law in 2023. (In the
subsequent session, the Georgia legislature enacted no such measure,
though it did pass another election-related bill
[[link removed]].)
In the February meeting
[[link removed]]
of the State Elections Board, which can issue rules for interpreting
election law, its chair, William Duffey, briefly noted that “we have
already identified” challenges “as an issue that we need to
address,” after a voting rights advocate raised concerns
[[link removed]]
about how they were being handled disparately.

“If you have two different counties handling” analogous
“challenges differently, we have an issue,” Edward Lindsey, a
Republican member of Georgia’s State Election Board, told
ProPublica, emphasizing that county and state election boards need to
work together to solve the problem. “It’s incumbent on us to have
a consistent system in determining who is and isn’t eligible to
vote. That needs to be consistent across 159 counties.”

When ProPublica asked the secretary of state’s office about the
inconsistent ways in which counties were handling the challenges, Mike
Hassinger, a spokesperson, said: “We’re going to try to get the
State Elections Board to issue guidance of some kind to answer all
these questions that you have.” He said that county elections board
members, who receive a small stipend for their part-time work, “are
having to make these decisions affecting people’s franchise” and
that the secretary of state’s office was going to encourage the
state board to “give them some rules to go by.”

Asked if the inconsistencies ProPublica identified had led to internal
discussions about how to update guidance around challenges, Hassinger
answered, “Oh, hell yeah. Absolutely.” The secretary of state’s
office subsequently issued a statement to ProPublica saying that the
office had already been working on creating “uniform standards for
voter challenges,” adding, “It is not ProPublica’s findings that
prompted us to do so.” In another statement, the office said that it
is “thankful” for “ProPublica’s additional information, and
have asked the state election board to provide rules.”

Duffey, the chair of the State Election Board, said that he had not
received recommendations regarding new rules from the secretary of
state’s office and that he had been independently drafting a
memorandum that would provide “an analytical process” to allow
counties to discern if a challenge should be considered under state or
federal law. He explained that past news coverage of voter challenges
and complaints from election officials prompted him to ask himself
during the 2022 election: “How can a county deal with that? And the
fact is, they can’t. There was nobody out there that was trying to
help them make the determination of how they ought to process
these.”

He went on to say: “As a practical matter, they probably didn't have
enough time to do it differently. But we do now. And now that the
election is over, we intend to do that.”

_[xxxxxx MODERATOR: READ MORE ON FIGHTING VOTER SUPPRESSION,
GERRYMANDERING, AND ELECTION DENIAL TACTICS - THE FREEDOM TO VOTE ACT
BY MICHAEL WALDMAN BRENNAN CENTER FOR JUSTICE
[[link removed]].]_

_DOUG BOCK CLARK is a reporter in ProPublica’s South unit. He
investigates threats to democracy and abuses of power throughout the
region._

_Irena Hwang
[[link removed]] and Joel Jacobs
[[link removed]] contributed data
reporting._

_PROPUBLICA is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign
up for The Big Story newsletter
[[link removed]]
to receive stories like this one in your inbox_.

* elections
[[link removed]]
* voting rights
[[link removed]]
* Georgia
[[link removed]]
* voter suppression
[[link removed]]
* legislation
[[link removed]]

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