Voters like James are why we continue fighting to protect the freedom to vote.

In 2018, James decided to cast his vote for Stacey Abrams in the neck-and-neck race for Governor of Georgia. This candidate and this race felt different to him — he was excited about Stacey Abrams and felt motivated to elect a leader who vowed to be a people’s governor. The last time he voted was in 2008, when he felt a similar drive to elect Barack Obama as our next president. He drove to the same polling location in suburban Atlanta where he’d last voted, along with his mother and brother. When he got to the front of the line, an issue came up: Poll workers couldn’t find James in their database of registered voters.

He waited for about 45 minutes while poll workers urgently looked to locate his registration. When they couldn’t, he filled out a provisional ballot. Thousands of other Georgians would find themselves in the same situation in the 2018 election, and about 75 percent of those provisional ballots would later be rejected. 

After James did some research, he learned that in July 2017, then Secretary of State Brian Kemp removed about 560,000 voters from the rolls overnight, with over 100,000 of those voters being marked as “inactive” as a result of the state’s “use it or lose it” policy. They hadn’t moved, died, or been incarcerated — they just didn’t vote in every single election. At the time, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that Kemp’s voter purge may be the largest mass voter disenfranchisement in U.S. history.

Since then, Georgia Republicans have continued to stage mass voter purges in every election off-year. In fact, this is happening right now as you read this: Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger is working to cancel over 191,000 voters’ registrations ahead of the critical 2024 election cycle. Over 51% of voters on the “purge” list are people of color.

This is one of the core reasons why Fair Fight was founded — and why we need your continued support. We’re currently calling and texting impacted voters to notify them of this purge and help them maintain their registrations before the August 13 deadline.

Thanks for everything,

The Fair Fight Team