Roughly 10,000 inactive voters on the sidelines in Georgia reregistered to vote the same day Vice President Kamala Harris held a rally in the battleground state.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has removed thousands of inactive, deceased, duplicate, and out-of-state voters from registration rolls as part of routine election maintenance processes. However, an Atlanta Journal-Constitution analysis of voter rolls showed that a portion of voters removed due to inactivity reregistered to vote on Sept. 20, the same day Harris rallied for abortion rights in Atlanta.
“These folks were registered before,” Lauren Groh-Wargo, the CEO of voting rights organization Fair Fight Action, told the Raw Story. “They didn’t vote for a set of years. They decided to vote again, but they had to take that additional step and burden of reregistering.”
The news could indicate momentum is growing for Harris in the battleground state. After President Joe Biden flipped the state blue in 2020, she has battled to knock former President Donald Trump’s razor-thin edge in Georgia. With just 33 days until the presidential election, the latest average of polls from Real Clear Politics showed the vice president trailing Trump by under two points.
Harris’s Atlanta campaign stop earlier this month came as her third visit to the state as a presidential candidate and her eighth overall visit to the state this year. She is set to visit Georgia again on Wednesday as the Biden administration oversees the federal response to states devastated by Hurricane Helene.
As the political candidates fight to win votes in the Peach State, its top election official has ramped up efforts to “clean up” voter registration rolls ahead of Election Day.
Raffensperger announced on Sept. 12 that the secretary of state’s office had identified 82,077 voters as having potentially moved out of state.
“They are being mailed notices prompting them to cancel their registration if they have moved,” a press release read.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Earlier this summer, Raffensperger said he would take steps to remove an additional 191,473 voter records labeled as “inactive status” from the voter rolls if no response is received to a mailed notice.
Georgia also recently gained attention for allowing residents to use a portal to update their registration status and remove themselves from voter rolls.