This week, voting rights lawyer Marc Elias shared the news on Twitter that a Georgia federal court had blocked Muscogee County authorities from challenging voters’ eligibility to participate in elections “solely on the basis of information” in the National Change of Address (NCOA) registry, which is a database affiliated with the U.S. Postal Service. Since addresses on file with the Postal Service carry significantly less apparent legal weight than addresses on file in areas like voter registration, there’s a clear opportunity for a significant gap between the qualities of the respective sets of address data.
🚨BREAKING: Georgia Federal Court ENJOINS "Muscogee County from upholding a challenge to any voter’s eligibility solely on the basis of information in the NCOA registry."
Victory over voter suppression for @MajorityFwd and the voters of Georgia. pic.twitter.com/60xvN44a2P
— Marc E. Elias (@marceelias) December 31, 2020
In the order that Elias shared, which appeared to be the work of U.S. District Court Judge Leslie A. Gardner, the court ordered Muscogee County authorities to “advise any voter whose eligibility has been challenged on the basis of the National Change of Address (NCOA) registry that [their] eligibility to vote has been challenged… [and that they] may cast a provisional ballot in the January 2021 runoff election.” The court also insisted that challenges to these voters’ eligibility to participate in the election “will not be sustained absent specific evidence of ineligibility.”
Judge Gardner has recently presided over a dispute involving a challenge that local resident Ralph Alton Russell brought against 4,033 registered Muscogee County voters, who he claimed were no longer eligible to vote in the county based on NCOA data. Russell chairs the Muscogee County Republican Party, but he said that he was filing the challenge in his personal rather than official capacity, and individual challenges to individual voters are allowed in Georgia. Majority Forward, which says on its website that it works to boost voter registration and voter turnout, challenged Russell’s effort in court, facing the apparent opposition of Georgia authorities including the Muscogee County elections board and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.
Russell’s original challenge was one of many that emerged across Georgia in the lead-up to Election Day in the state’s ongoing Senate races, and although other counties rejected the NCOA database-based challenges as too flimsy, Muscogee and Ben Hill Counties allowed the challenges to proceed. Majority Forward filed its lawsuit challenging these developments alongside Gamaliel Warren Turner, Sr., a registered voter who temporarily moved to California for a contract job with the U.S. Navy and was among the targeted voters. The lawsuit characterized the process of comparing NCOA data with voter registration information as “inconclusive and error-prone”; after all, as Cobb County attorneys recently noted when dismissing a challenge to local voters, “many people change their address for various reasons.”
