Presenters urge audits and tighter data validation of Georgia voter rolls; committee hears competing views

A series of presentations to the House Governmental Affairs Committee on [date not specified] urged state action to audit Georgia’s voter rolls, automate data validation and tighten processes the presenters said allow ineligible registrations to remain active.

Dr. Rick Richards, a private researcher who said he has worked with large population data since 1980, told the committee he analyzed the Georgia voter roll and United States Postal Service change-of-address data and found what he described as widespread data problems. “A simple standard data validation could fix 2,900,000 errors in our current Georgia voter roll,” Richards said. He listed examples he said were present in the February voter roll: registrations with only a first initial (5,986), hundreds of thousands of records with incomplete middle-name fields, roughly 311,000 registrants with no contact in six years, and more than a quarter-million registrants his analysis matched as having moved out of state via the USPS National Change of Address (NCOA) data.

Richards urged an independent audit and changes to law that would…