Feds slap Georgia’s voter ID checks

The U.S. Department of Justice has told Georgia officials that their efforts to verify the identities and citizenship of registered voters amount to substantial changes to state policy and are unenforceable without approval under the Voting Rights Act.

Georgia Attorney General Thurbert Baker received the letter at 5:30 p.m. Wednesday, his spokesman said.

It was not immediately clear what the ramifications of the letter are for the state or its counties.

“We have been in consultation with our client and remain in contact with our client about how to respond to this DOJ inquiry,” Baker spokesman Russ Willard said. The client is Secretary of State Karen Handel, the state’s chief elections officer.

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.

Efforts to reach the Justice Department late Wednesday were unsuccessful.

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.

The state is also examining the citizenship of some Georgia voters. As of Friday, the secretary of state had asked counties to check the status of 2,675 individuals whose driver’s license records indicated they were not citizens, but who had registered to vote, Carrothers said.

“It’s imperative that the information provided by the voter is true and they are who they say they are,” Carrothers said.

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.

The campaign asked the Department of Justice to determine whether the citizenship checks should be subject to the pre-clearance rules of the Voting Rights Act. That landmark civil rights law requires certain states, including Georgia, to have the Department of Justice approve in advance any planned changes to voting or election laws.

“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.

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 Sharon 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.