“It’s been a voter suppression. Massive scale voter suppression.” LaTosha Brown, founder of the Black Voters Matter Fund, said during a news conference on Wednesday (December 2).
Brown, along with C.K. Hoffler of Rainbow PUSH, and Transformative Justice Coalition founder Barbara Arnwine are listed as plaintiffs in a lawsuit against Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger accusing his office of violating the National Voter Registration Act.
The suit, filed in the northern district court of Georgia, claims Raffensperger purged approximately 198,000 voters who moved away from the addresses listed on their voter registration cards.
The organizers are working to get the hundreds of thousands of voters reinstated before the December 7 voter registration deadline for the contentious January Senate runoff election.
A September report by the Georgia chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) cited an investigation by independent journalist, Greg Palast, who found that nearly 300,000 were removed from the rolls. Further investigation indicated that several thousand voters had died or moved, but that 198,000 were incorrectly purged.
The ACLU released a statement saying the majority of those purged from rolls were mostly “young voters, voters of lower income, and citizens of racial groups that have been denied their sacred right to vote in the past.”
Georgia voting system implementation manager Gabriel Sterling dismissed the claims in a press conference on Wednesday (December 2). “I’m going to go with no,” he said in response to a question about the lawsuit, adding, “Frankly, I’ve not seen or heard of this lawsuit yet.”
Sterling called for an end to threats he and other voting officials, including poll workers, are receiving, naming President Donald Trump and incumbent Republican Senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler to condemn the behavior.
The January Senate runoff between republican incumbents and Democratic challengers Jon Ossoff and Rev. Raphael Warnock, respectively, will likely determine which party will control the Senate.
With such high stakes, voting rights groups and officials are feeling the pressure to ensure a fair election.
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