IN ATLANTA — An election board in one of Georgia’s biggest counties has decided that people who question a voter’s eligibility will have to pay for the cost of letting the voters in question know about the problem.
The Cobb County Board of Elections and Registrations agreed to the rule on Tuesday by a vote of 4-1. Debbie Fisher, a Republican on the board, was the only person who voted against the rule.
As part of a nationwide effort led by Donald Trump’s supporters to remove names from the voter rolls, Republican activists are challenging thousands of voters in Georgia. The activists say that letting those names stay on the rolls will lead to fraud because most of the people they are after have moved away from their old address. But Democrats and liberals who fight for voting rights say Republicans are challenging voters to either get rid of Democrats or make people doubt the results of elections before the 2024 presidential election.
Democrats have been pushing to start charging for each challenge filed, in part as an effort to deter people from targeting hundred or thousands of voters using software programs such as EagleAI or IV3 that facilitate mass challenges.
Democrats want to start charging for each challenge that is filed. This is partly an effort to stop people from going after hundreds or thousands of voters using software like EagleAI or IV3 that makes it easy to file many challenges at once. A law from 2021 in Georgia says that one person can challenge as many voters in their own county as they want.
Atlanta’s Cobb County used to be a stronghold for Republicans but now has a Democratic majority. The board decided to only charge for printing and mailing the challenge notice, which will probably cost less than a dollar per challenge. That might add up, though. The head of elections in Cobb County, Tate Fall, says it cost around $1,600 to mail out notices for the 2,472 challenges that were filed last month.
Democrats also want counties to charge people who file challenges for the time it takes staff to do research and handle the cases. But Daniel White, a lawyer for the board, said on Tuesday that he came to the conclusion that the board couldn’t do that unless state law is changed to make it clear. But he said he came to the conclusion that the board has the natural power to charge for sending notices, just like a court has the natural power to charge someone for giving the defendants notice of a lawsuit.
“If you have to send notices to 3,000 voters who are being challenged, that really raises your costs,” White said.
But Republicans were against the bill. Fisher said that charging people for using their challenge rights was “egregious” and “just wrong.”
She is the chair of the Cobb County Republican Party. Salleigh Grubbs said that the board isn’t doing its job of keeping the voter rolls clean, so challengers are stepping in to help.
He said, “It’s a shame that the Board of Elections is trying to charge people for doing the work they should be doing.”
The board also made some changes to the rules about challenges. For example, it said that it would not accept challenges against people who have already been put on the list of inactive voters. Inactive voter registrations in Georgia can only be cancelled if a voter doesn’t respond to a mailing and then doesn’t vote in two federal general elections after moving. This is what federal law says.
It takes years to do that. Challengers have been going after voters who don’t do anything to get rid of them faster.
Part of the reason counties are making their own rules is that the state hasn’t told them how to handle problems. Because of this, counties deal with the same kinds of problems in different ways.
The Associated Press looked at Georgia’s 40 largest counties and found that more than 18,000 voters were challenged in 2023 and 2024. Most of these challenges were turned down by the counties, though. More than a hundred thousand people were challenged in 2020, 2021, and 2022.
As of July 1, a new law made it easier for people who want to remove someone from office to do so. This could lead to a lot more challenges. Some groups have sued to stop the Georgia law, saying it breaks federal law.
