Judge declines to halt Georgia’s voter screening

A federal judge on Thursday allowed the state of Georgia to continue verifying the citizenship of registered voters with a statewide database.

U.S. District Court Judge Jack Camp denied a request for a temporary restraining order from civil rights groups representing a Kennesaw State University student from Cherokee County.

Camp said that while he was not granting that request, the court “is not foreclosing the possibility of some form of future interim relief.” He noted that next Wednesday a three-judge court will hear arguments over the lawsuit’s Voting Rights Act claims.

Secretary of State Karen Handel celebrated the ruling.

“I am very pleased with Judge Camp’s decision and view this as a victory for protecting the integrity of Georgia’s elections,” Handel said in a statement.

Some Metro Atlanta counties have already stopped the processes in question as the lawsuit and parallel inquiry by the U.S. Justice Department move forward.

That is of little comfort to attorneys for the plaintiff, Jose Morales.

Laughlin McDonald, an attorney for the ACLU Voting Rights Project, expressed disappointment. “But this doesn’t preclude an injunction by the three-judge court, and Judge Camp did concede that the claim was not a frivolous one,” McDonald said.

The Georgia suit is one of several nationwide as some groups seek to drive voter registration to new levels and others try to protect against perceived abuses and potential election fraud.

Camp said an overriding reason for denying the order is preserving the integrity of the voting process. If Handel cannot use the database-matching verification system, the state will be unable to fraudulent or disqualified voters, he said.

“Since the possibility of fraudulent and inaccurate voting could significantly injure and diminish the public’s respect and confidence in the electoral process, the state’s ability to maintain reliable voter lists is paramount to a temporary and minor inconvenience to a few individuals,” Camp wrote.

Handel is required under the Help America Vote Act of 2002 to create a system of verifying information provided by voter registration applicants by matching the information against the state driver’s license database and the Social Security Administration database.

“HAVA mandates a vigorous verification process to prevent voter fraud and to ensure that the individuals being registered to vote are qualified voters,” Camp wrote. “Without … utilizing HAVA’s database matching process, local registrars will have no practical means of identifying which registrants are not citizens, and the mere possibility of fraudulent voting could damage the public’s respect for the electoral process.”

The civil rights groups representing Morales said the screening process amounted to a systematic purging of voter rolls only a few weeks before the Nov. 4 elections.

Morales, a naturalized U.S. citizen, registered to vote this year in Cherokee County.

In September, he received a letter from the county registrar telling him that the state had flagged him as possibly not being a U.S. citizen. He was told he had to provide his citizenship either at a scheduled hearing or in person before then. Otherwise, he could not vote.

Morales went the to registrar, presented his passport, was cleared and was mailed his voter registration card. When Morales then received additional letters from the registrar questioning his citizenship, he filed suit.

The suit alleges the screening process violates the Voting Rights Act of 1965, because it was not pre-cleared by the Justice Department, and the National Voter Registration Act of 1993.