A lawsuit in Georgia claims nearly 200,000 registered voters were improperly purged.



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Voter advocacy groups in Georgia filed a lawsuit on Wednesday asking a federal court to force the state to restore nearly 200,000 names to its voter registration list ahead of the January run-off ballot for them. two seats in the State Senate that will determine the balance of power in Washington.

In the lawsuit, filed in Georgia’s Northern District, three voter advocacy groups said the state improperly removed 198,000 people from its electoral rolls in 2019 on the grounds that they had changed addresses.

The Georgian branch of the American Civil Liberties Union released a report in September based on an investigation by progressive freelance journalist Greg Palast, who found that most of the estimated 300,000 people deported had not changed their minds. address. Since the end of the investigation, several thousand voters have died or moved, but more than 195,000 have remained unduly affected, says the trial.

Georgia’s ACLU said in a statement that those removed from the lists were likely “young voters, low-income voters and citizens of racial groups who have been denied their sacred right to vote in the past.”

The lawsuit comes after a pair of hard-fought Senate races in which none of the main candidates won 50% of the vote, sending both contests to the second round which will take place on January 5. A race pits Republican Senator David Perdue against Democrat Jon Ossoff. . In the other, Senator Kelly Loeffler, also a Republican, will face a Democratic challenge from the Reverend Raphael Warnock. If the Democrats win both races, they will effectively control the Senate.

The Georgian Secretary of State’s office, headed by Brad Raffensperger, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But in a separate press conference on Wednesday, Gabriel Sterling, responsible for implementing the voting system in Georgia, dismissed the allegations.

“I’m going to go without it,” he said, when asked if his office had purged nearly 200,000 voters from the registration lists. “Frankly, I haven’t seen or heard of this trial yet.”

Since the election, Mr. Raffensperger’s office has been prosecuted by baseless allegations of election fraud by the Trump campaign. Mr Raffensperger has repeatedly said that the results of the elections in Georgia are trustworthy.

LaTosha Brown, head of the Black Voters Matter Fund, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, said the issue with the election was not voter fraud.

“It was an election crackdown,” she told a press conference Wednesday with members of other advocacy groups. “Massive suppression of voters.”

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