Georgia
Georgia set to purge nearly half-million inactive voters this summer
Georgia set to purge`inactive voters this summer
This summer, hundreds of thousands of voter registrations will be wiped from the voter registration list. Georgia election officials plan to remove more than 450,000 inactive voter registrations. It’s one of the largest cancelations of voter registrations in U.S. history.
ATLANTA – Georgia election officials plan to remove nearly a half-million inactive voters from the registry.
It is one of the biggest planned purges in the country.
What they’re saying:
Blake Evans, elections director with the Secretary of State’s Office, says Georgia wants to maintain election integrity. “We want to make sure we have the most accurate voter list in the nation,” Evans said.
The agency will cancel about 455,000 inactive voter registrations in July. “We do this to keep our voter list accurate,” Evans said.
The Electronic Registration Information Center, ERIC, reports when a voter has moved out of state and is no longer eligible to vote. According to ERIC, 170,000 voters appear to have moved. The state says 100,000 people have not voted or had any contact with election officials for at least nine years.
“We want to ensure that voters who live here and are lawfully registered remain registered, and that anyone who moves out of state and has an outdated record gets their record removed following the lawful process,” Evans said.
Who it will affect
What we know:
Under Georgia’s “use it or lose it” law, voters can lose their registrations if they don’t remain in contact with election officials for five years and miss the next two general elections. Evans says the state is maintaining election integrity. “It’s very fair and it’s in accordance with state and federal laws,” Evans said.
The other side:
The plan is raising concerns from critics. Helen Butler, executive director of The Georgia Coalition for the People’s Agenda, is skeptical. “That many people, I’m really concerned that eligible voters will be removed and shouldn’t be removed,” Butler said. “You still live in Georgia, you’re still a resident, you should be able to vote.”
Butler worries the cancelations could disenfranchise people with unreliable mail delivery, those who have lost their homes, and other legitimate registered voters. “There are a lot of people who are being removed just because they haven’t voted in an election cycle, two presidential election cycles,” Butler said. “People of color, those in underserved communities, and residents of rural areas often lack transportation to vote.”
What we don’t know:
The agency will publish a list of the planned cancelations in July.
What’s next:
Voters will get the chance to contact county election officials to keep their registrations intact.
The Source: FOX 5’s Christopher King spoke with Blake Evans, elections director with the Secretary of State’s Office, and Helen Butler, executive director of The Georgia Coalition for the People’s Agenda.
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Kirk Fordice-like Rick Jackson is sounding a whole lot like Daniel Kirkwood Fordice as he tries to be elected Georgia’s next governor.
Fordice came out of nowhere — actually, Vicksburg is somewhere but you know what I mean — in 1991 to become a two-term Mississippi governor.
He had money but nothing like Jackson, a billionaire businessman who’s also trying to emerge from nowhere politically to win Georgia’s top office.
“The establishment hated Trump, because they couldn’t control him. They are going to hate me,” Jackson says in an ad for Georgia’s Republican Primary on May 19, sounding like one of my favorite Mississippi governors — Fordice, because of his unpredictable personality (he could vilify or charm you, all in one sentence), not his politics. He died in 2004 of cancer.
I stood by a cafe entrance one morning, waiting to cover a Fordice speech. When he appeared, I stuck out my hand to shake his. “I’m not shaking your damn hand. You’re part of the problem down there (referring to the newspaper),” he told me, smiling and moving on.
Jackson rose to become one of economic giant-Georgia’s wealthiest people. He came from Atlanta’s rough midtown area, ending up in the foster care system. He left college due to poor financial circumstances.
The 71-year-old Jackson wormed his way into the dynamic city’s business scene in the late 1970s, mostly of the healthcare variety with mixed success before starting a workforce staffing and services company and later an antibiotics manufacturing plant. He turned those businesses into billion-dollar enterprises.
“It’s God’s money,” he said in rural Blakely, and he’s been charitable with it.
Jackson doesn’t try to hide his vast wealth. His family lives in a 48,000-square-foot mansion at Cumming, a place of nearly 100,000 people near Atlanta in Forsyth County, which once promoted its almost all-white population as a virtue.
Atlanta Journal-Constitution columnist Bill Torpy recently wrote that Jackson will spend a ton of his own money in seeking another mansion, the one occupied by Georgia’s governor. Torpy noted that present Lt. Gov. Burt Jones was once heavily favored to win the primary race, but he’s fallen behind Jackson’s bold money bid.
“The one-time front-runner in the Republican primary (Jones) has been relegated to No. 2, the result of a $100 million Mack truck running him over.
Rick Jackson, a billionaire healthcare tycoon, a man with a sly smile and reptilian gaze, is the guy driving that truck,” Torpy wrote.
The GOP field includes Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger, who spurned Trump’s demand to find 11,780 votes that would’ve allowed him to win Georgia in 2020.
Fordice was effective with some bombastic rhetoric during his run for governor, but I don’t remember it reaching the histrionic level employed by Jackson. In a major ad blitz, often referencing (Georgia college student) Laken Riley’s murderer, Jackson promises that unauthorized immigrants committing violent crimes will be “deported or departed … any questions?”
In another ad, Jackson growled, “Like President Trump, I don’t owe anybody anything, and like you, I’m sick of career politicians.”
Fordice spent only $1 million to get himself elected Mississippi’s governor. He somewhat sneaked up on the establishment, riding no escalator to the first floor of his Vicksburg concrete river mats-contracting office to declare his intentions. Who could ever forget his announcement seeking the governorship that ran on page 5 of the Clarion Ledger?
Recent polling ahead of Georgia’s May primaries for governor shows the eventual Republican nominee faces a strong Democrat in the November general election, most likely former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms. That’ll require another whole pot of money.
— Mac Gordon, a native of McComb, is a retired Mississippi newspaperman. He can be reached at macmarygordon@gmail.com.
Gulfstream recently announced a $5 million investment in Georgia education, welcoming students and leaders to its Savannah headquarters.
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