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ATLANTA – A federal judge on Thursday ordered the Georgian electoral authorities to take additional measures to inform citizens and enable them to solve problems related to their requests for voting by correspondence or correspondence.
Leigh Martin May, US District Judge, said that if the information about the candidate or elector was incomplete or if the signature does not match, people should have the opportunity to make changes so that their vote counts for the 6 November election.
The injunction follows lawsuits filed earlier this month by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Civil Rights Lawyers Committee under the law on behalf of several minority rights and voting rights groups. .
Brian Kemp, who, as Georgian Secretary of State, oversees the elections and is also a Republican candidate for governorship this year, was among the defendants cited. Democrat Stacey Abrams, Kemp's opponent, made the increase in the number of minority votes the focus of his campaign strategy.
Ms. Abrams and her supporters continue to accuse Mr. Kemp of trying to suppress the minority vote and have asked him to resign as secretary of state. Kemp and his supporters have accused Abrams of advocating a relaxation of electoral legislation so that even non-citizens can vote.
Ms. Abrams, 44, a former leader of a minority of the House of Representatives states, is seeking to become the first female black governor in US history. Kemp, 54, is seeking to continue to control the party's GOP government since 2003.
Recent polls show that the race is near and that Mr. Kemp is leading only a few points in a state dominated for years by the GOP.
Prosecution has argued that state election commissions should better inform people if their absentee applications or ballot papers were about to be rejected and give them time to correct them. They argued that state laws were unclear and allowed for potential problems.
The injunction "was a victory for democracy and for all voters absent in the state of Georgia," said Sean Young, legal director of the ACLU of Georgia.
The state filed written objections on Thursday, saying the decision was "impracticable" because it required a lengthy appeal process when the law required all votes to be certified on the Monday following the elections.
After the preliminary injunction, the state filed an urgent motion to arrest him. "Last-minute challenges to longstanding electoral procedures (…) threaten to disrupt the smooth conduct of elections, which is essential to the functioning of our participatory democracy," he said.
We did not know how many votes the injunction would affect. In a document quoted Wednesday, the judge cited the plaintiffs, saying that several hundred ballot papers and applications had been rejected this year. It ordered that rejected applications and ballots be considered. But she also wrote that the groups that brought the lawsuits "have not identified any voter to whom these laws have been applied unconstitutionally".
A spokeswoman for the Secretary of State sent all the questions to the Attorney General's office, which represented the state in the cases. A spokeswoman for this office declined to comment but communicated the state's written objections to the order.
Mr. Kemp's campaign did not respond to requests for comment. The Abrams campaign issued a statement that the injunction was "an important step in the right direction for Georgian voters who deserve to have their constitutional rights protected".
Write to Cameron McWhirter at [email protected]
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