Candace Smith did everything right.
During Georgia’s May 2024 primary, an Atlanta lawyer voted early to take the time to iron out any potential issues and ensure his vote was counted.
But on Election Day, when she went online to check her voting status, a warning popped up: Someone had challenged her voter registration status.
“I was shocked,” Smith said, adding that he’d been an active voter in Fulton County for decades and that the challenge had no basis or evidence. “None of it made any sense.”
Smith, an attorney and longtime voting rights advocate in Georgia, was a defender of her rights. She immediately contacted the Fulton County Elections Department, raised the issue with her supervisors, and double-checked that her vote was counted. But for the average person, she says, encountering a voter challenge can be an insurmountable barrier. If she had less time or knowledge of the complex network of election infrastructure, she says, “it could have been an issue that prevented me from voting, or something that would have discouraged me from going to the polls in the fall.”
Citizen voter challenges, once a low-key practice, have morphed into a mass movement in Georgia, where conservative activists have challenged hundreds of thousands of voter registrations over the past few years. Waves of voter challenges often coincide with competitive, high-profile elections, and election conspiracy theorists use complaints of widespread voter fraud to cast doubt on the results. Voters of color, particularly Black voters, have been disproportionately affected by these mass disenfranchisement efforts.
And voting rights experts say a newly passed election law known as SB 189 is likely to make the problem worse.
The evolution of voter challenge laws
Challenges to voter registrations are not new. Nearly every state in the country has laws that allow residents to notify their local elections board if they find that someone is voting fraudulently. In Georgia, citizen campaigns to challenge voter registrations date back to the 1940s, when white supremacists mobilized to block black voters’ access to polling places. But in modern times, these laws have not posed widespread barriers to voting until recently.
“The voter challenge law was originally written for a slightly different time,” said Andrew Gerber, an attorney at the Brennan Center for Justice who has been tracking a flood of voter challenges since 2021. “It was a way for someone to say, ‘I personally know someone who is disqualified from voting who is trying to come to the polls.’
But in recent years, state legislators have passed sweeping changes to election law that give election conspiracy theorists greater power to challenge other voters. SB 202, the 2021 elections bill, codifies the right of any one person to challenge an unlimited number of voter registrations. Voting rights groups see the mass challenges as a voter intimidation tactic.
“As a voter, it can be frightening to find out that your name is listed as ineligible to vote,” Gerber said, adding that being challenged “increases the likelihood that you will ultimately be unable to vote or choose not to vote.”
In the years since SB 202 took effect, several conservative activists have filed widespread lawsuits, accusing hundreds of thousands of Georgia residents of being fraudulently registered to vote. The advent of technology like EagleAI has allowed activists to comb through massive datasets like the National Change of Address Database to identify people who may be misregistered and then present the discrepancies to local election officials as evidence of fraud.
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“These are people who are on the electoral rolls,” said Andrea Young, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia, which has vowed to sue Gov. Brian Kemp over SB 189. “These are not people who are ineligible to vote.”
She added that administrative errors often prevent voters from voting. For example, if a county fails to include a resident’s apartment number on voter registration, that resident could be accused by activists of having a duplicate voter registration.
“The idea of this challenge is to take what may have been a government mistake and put the burden on citizens who did their duty and registered to vote,” Young said.
Although a small number of people regularly file voter challenges, the open-ended nature of voter challenge laws allows these activists to cast a wide net: A 2023 ProPublica investigation found that nearly 90% of voter challenges filed since the passage of SB 202, targeting 89,000 voters, were filed by just six people.
Origins of SB 189
While SB 202 can be credited with expanding protections for those filing mass voter challenges, SB 189 served as a significant response measure that further changed the mass challenge landscape in Georgia.
more:‘A rollback of voter rights’: Citizens, voting rights groups react to Georgia election law SB 189
During the 2024 legislative session, Georgia lawmakers began to realize that the high volume of voter challenges was having a negative impact on local election boards, the recipients of voter challenges.
Many local election officials had no experience dealing with voter challenges before receiving hundreds or even thousands of voter challenges at one time, and they did not receive additional assistance in dealing with the influx. SB 189’s mass voter challenge provisions were created to implement procedures for local election officials to follow.
“There seems to be an inconsistency about whether a challenge is allowed or denied, and we want to codify the fact that there are very limited grounds for allowing a challenge,” state Sen. Max Barnes, who authored both SB 202 and SB 189, said during a March committee meeting where the voter challenge language was considered.
The resulting law did just the opposite: It lists several criteria that election commissioners can consider when receiving a challenge, such as whether they knew the voter had died, but it places no limits on the evidence that activists can present when questioning other voters, or on the number of challenges anyone can file at one time, and it doesn’t even require that challenges be filed by state residents.
In addition, federal law prohibits states from systematically purging voters from their rolls within 90 days of an election, but voter registration can They can be revoked on a case-by-case basis within that time frame. SB 189 allows county election boards to continue removing voters up to 45 days before an election. All of these factors are creating confusion for local election boards.
“Even if unsuccessful, a challenge would have many aftereffects,” Garber said, “including voter intimidation and confusion, as well as the waste of a significant amount of election officials’ time.”
The New Face of Voter Suppression
The technology used by election conspiracy theorists is certainly modern: They’ve launched a network of grassroots activists who use apps and software platforms to challenge voter registrations and conduct nationwide training sessions over Zoom. But civil rights groups say the tactics these groups are employing are just the latest facet of an ongoing effort to limit access for minority voters.
more:Voter ID and absentee ballot restrictions: Southern tightens key voting laws ahead of election
“Conservatives have used election fraud conspiracy theories for decades to cast doubt on election losses,” said Brendan Fischer, deputy executive director of Documented, a watchdog group that has tracked the rise in mass voter challenges.
“Deniers have a certain deep-seated suspicion of communities that they believe are more vulnerable to fraud,” added Documented researcher Emma Steiner. “They’re very suspicious of college campuses and dorms. They’re very suspicious of minority neighborhoods. They’re very suspicious of the conspiracy theories that are rooted in deniers about who is committing voter fraud and who is trying to overturn the election.”
Activists also say that for voters of color in particular, being challenged brings back painful memories of generations of violence and discrimination.
“You can imagine that people who have been voters since they were 18 years old, they’ve been voting for 30, 40 years,” said Georgia NAACP President Gerald Griggs. “For other citizens to challenge them is questioning their very citizenship, whether they have the legal right to vote or not. And for many African-Americans, it harkens back to Jim Crow laws. It harkens back to slavery itself.”
Lauren Groh Wargo, CEO of the nonprofit voting rights group Fair Fight, said even when restrictive voting laws don’t explicitly target people of color, marginalized communities have historically borne the brunt of laws that make it harder to vote.
“Looking back, we can see that the practices and laws to ‘clean up’ voter rolls at that time often used race-neutral language, followed by racially targeted efforts to remove Black people,” Groh-Wargo said of historical voter suppression tactics.
Ultimately, Groh-Wargo hopes the rise in mass voter challenges will help mobilize Georgia voters in the upcoming election year.
“If your vote didn’t matter, we wouldn’t be changing the rules every two years and trying to put up barriers,” she said. “Your vote does matter.”
Maya Homan is an Atlanta-based USA TODAY fellow covering Georgia politics and elections. Follow her on X (formerly Twitter) as @MayaHoman.
