Presenters urge state audit of Georgia voter rolls and election technology; lawmakers offer mixed responses

Several citizen presenters told the Georgia House Governmental Affairs Committee that the state’s voter registration files and some county election databases contain address and name errors and that an independent audit and more transparency are needed.

Dr. Rick Richards, presenting data he said he obtained from the Georgia Secretary of State and U.S. Postal Service records, said the state’s February voter roll included hundreds of thousands of problematic records and that many entries could be corrected by automated data‑validation. “The most common precursor to voter suppression or disenfranchisement are when an ineligible registration is allowed to be on the voter roll and an ineligible registration is then not removed when we find out that it’s ineligible,” Richards told the committee. He cited missing middle names, large numbers of registrations tied to PO boxes and addresses that county records showed as closed or vacant.

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