Cobb backs off hearing for questionable voters

Cobb County has canceled hearings scheduled for Monday for voters who were notified that their citizenship was in doubt.

The decision by the county comes a day after the Department of Justice told Georgia officials that the state’s efforts to verify the identity and citizenship of registered voters must be approved by the federal government in advance.

Cobb County spokesman Robert Quigley said Thursday morning that the county is attempting to contact those voters who were originally told to appear Monday for the hearings.

Asked why the hearings were canceled, Quigley referred questions to the Georgia Secretary of State’s office.

“I understand the process has not been confirmed by DOJ,” Quigley said.

But a spokesman for Secretary of State Karen Handel said Thursday they did not tell the counties to hold the hearings in the first place or to cancel them.

“The Secretary of State has not spoken today to Cobb County about the issue,” Matt Carrothers said. “And the office cannot instruct the counties to have a hearing.”

Carrothers also said Handel’s office is working with Attorney General Thurbert Baker to respond to the Department of Justice.

“The secretary of state is working with the attorney general to address the Department of Justice’s questions and will respond as quickly as possible,” Carrothers said.

He declined to answer further questions.

The letter from the Department of Justice was sent late Wednesday to Baker. A spokesman for Baker said that they are in contact with Handel’s office and will respond on Handel’s behalf.

As of Friday, Handel’s office had asked counties to check the status of 2,675 individuals statewide whose driver’s license records indicated they were not citizens, but who had registered to vote, according to Handel’s office.

It is not immediately clear if all counties had scheduled hearings similar to the ones planned in Cobb.

The Justice Department, under the 1965 Voting Rights Act, must approve in advance any planned changes to Georgia’s voting and election rules to ensure there will be no adverse impacts on minority voting. A spokesman for the Justice Department refused to comment about the letter Thursday.

Christopher Coates, chief of the Justice Department’s Voting Section, told Baker in his letter that the state has appeared to make several changes to voting and election policy in the state. They include:

• Revisions to voter registration applications.

• A process to verify voter registration information against Georgia Department of Driver’s Services databases and the federal Social Security Administration.

• Generating reports of the results of those checks to counties for further action.

• And issuing a series of memos from the Secretary of State to counties concerning the identity verification process.

“The scope of these changes appear to be substantial,” Coates wrote.

The changes, Coates wrote, “are legally unenforceable unless and until preclearance” is obtained.

Matt Carrothers, a spokesman for Handel, declined to comment about the letter late Wednesday. But, he noted that in 2007 the Department of Justice ordered the state to verify voter identities by cross checking driver and Social Security data.

The letter comes days after the Social Security Administration questioned the state’s high volume of requests to verify voter identities. Georgia’s 2 million requests surpassed those of any other state.

Barack Obama’s campaign said it is worried that legitimate voters could be mistakenly flagged by the verification system and be denied their right to vote.

“All we want is for people who earned the right to vote and should properly vote be allowed to vote,” said Caroline Adelman, a spokeswoman for the Democratic presidential hopeful’s Georgia campaign. “And, if they shouldn’t be voting for any reason, we don’t want them voting, either.”

Before approaching the Department of Justice, Obama’s campaign first asked Handel’s office to reverse course, according to a letter from Obama’s Georgia team to Handel’s office.

Some county elections offices have sent letters to residents questioning their right to vote based on checks that Handel’s office has run against data from the Department of Driver’s Services and the Social Security Administration. Cobb County asked voters whose citizenship the state questioned to attend a hearing Monday, warning that their names would be removed from the list of registered voters if they failed to attend or provide proof beforehand. Those hearings have now been canceled.

The state double-checks information on all newly registered voters and also on established voters if they have changed their name, driver’s license number or Social Security number, Carrothers said.

The Help America Vote Act requires states to verify voter information using those databases.

A mismatch, and thus a question about a voter’s eligibility, could be triggered by a name change, such as for a marriage or divorce, that’s reported to a county voter registration office, but that doesn’t appear in one of the other government databases. For new citizens, the letters could be triggered if someone applied for a license when they had a green card, but subsequently became a citizen.

Gwinnett County has sent out about 200 letters more or less, a county elections official said.

Neville Wright, 54, a Marietta school teacher, said his wife, Dorothy Rodney-Wright, 54, received one of the letters from Cobb County on Sept. 25 questioning her citizenship.

The couple from Jamaica became U.S. citizens late last year, he said, and they registered to vote in January.

The couple went to the Cobb County elections office last week and showed their passports.

“The young lady indicated we are OK,” Neville Wright said.

The couple plan to vote today. “I wonder if it’s a ploy to prevent people from voting,” Wright said.

A voting rights group and a spokesperson from the Obama campaign asks the same question.

“There have been a bunch of people who have been able to come into Cobb County and prove that they are citizens, which suggests there are some significant flaws in the system they’re using,” said Sarah Shalf, an attorney with Georgia Election Protection. “It is troubling to us. It’s troubling that a lot of people are getting letters questioning their citizenship.”

Shalf said some of the people who are getting letters have been voting for many years.

Adelman said some people have been flagged inappropriately.

“We think the majority of the people they think are foreigners — while there may be a few people on there who may be — we think the majority of them are probably just fine,” she said.

Carrothers disputed the idea that longtime voters are being checked.

“If they’re insinuating that we’re going back and checking people registered to vote prior to the March 2007 agreement … they are absolutely incorrect,” he said.