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Saturday, October 4, 2008
More on an Obama surge: Black Georgians nearly match whites in new voter registration
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Secretary of State Karen Handel is on record saying that there is no giant surge of voter registration in Georgia — and in the largest context, she’s right.
Newly released figures from her office show that 406,379 new voters registered between Jan. 1 to Sept. 30. Four years ago, the number was 371,932.
Overall, that’s a 9 percent increase from ’04 to ’08 — hardly surprising in a presidential race with no incumbent. Barack Obama or no Barack Obama.
But this is far from the whole story. Those same numbers show that 164,859 of those new voters are African-American. And 176,570 of those new voters are white.
That’s a 27 percent increase in new voter registration for African-Americans over ’04, and a 13.7 percent decrease in new voter registration for whites over ’04.
This is significant given that, overall, blacks make up 29 percent of Georgia’s 5.5 million voters. And it fits with the fact that, in the first days of early voting in Georgia, African-Americans have cast nearly 40 percent of the ballots.
See the month-by-month registration numbers for yourself here.
Overall, new registration by non-white voters (including Asians and Hispanics) outpaced new registration by white voters, 230,036 to 176,570.
Even this isn’t the whole story. Monday is the final day to register to vote in time for the Nov. 4 presidential election. No doubt you saw this AJC article on the routine purging of voters from the rolls.
Handel’s office won’t say how many names have been purged this year, but 274,000 were removed last year for inactivity.
There’s nothing to suggest that this process isn’t on the up-and-up. But remember the Feb. 5 presidential primary? African-Americans made up 30 percent of the 2 million votes cast.
That means, statistically, a disproportionate number of African-Americans protected themselves from being purged from voter rolls for inactivity.
