A federal district court in Georgia ruled that county election officials in two Georgia counties cannot remove more than 4,100 voters from the voter registration rolls and require that they file provisional ballots in the upcoming Senate runoff elections.
Republicans had sought to have more than 4,000 voters in Muscogee and and 100 Ben Hill Counties removed from voter lists based on data from the United States Postal Service’s National Change of Address database, claiming that the voters were no longer eligible because of address requirements. Muscogee County, the home of Columbus, Georgia’s third largest city, went strongly to Democrats in the November election; the small county of Ben Hill voted largely for Republicans.
Judge Leslie Gardner, an Obama appointee, ruled that such action was unwarranted and unjustified, saying that blocking the votes would cause irreparable harm to the voters and the plaintiffs in the case. The judge ruled that the defendants in the case, the county election officials, relied on “inaccurate, unreliable, and inconclusive data allegedly drawn from the NCOA registry.”