Georgia sued for voter ID checks

Voting rights groups on Thursday sued Secretary of State Karen Handel on behalf of a Cherokee County man who they said has been the victim of a methodical effort to deny him the right to vote.

The suit, filed in U.S. District Court in Atlanta, seeks to halt the state’s attempts to verify the identities and citizenship of registered voters so close to the Nov. 4 election. Attorneys for the plaintiff, Jose Morales, also want the suit to become a class action.

U.S. District Judge Jack Camp scheduled a hearing for this morning on a request for a temporary restraining order.

The suit comes the day after the U.S. Department of Justice said the state’s actions to verify identity and citizenship appear to violate the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The law requires states with a history of discriminatory voting practices to get approval from the federal government before making certain changes to voting and election policy.

“The Voting Rights Act and the National Voter Registration Act were intended to protect voters from ‘October surprises,’ the last-minute purging of registered voters on questionable data,” said Neil Bradley, associate director of the ACLU Voting Rights Project, one of the groups representing Morales.

Secretary of State Karen Handel said in a news release issued Thursday night that she is “disappointed” with the lawsuit.

“Unfortunately, some groups appear to want to open the door to allow non-citizens to register and vote in the General Election,” she wrote.

County election officials still have more than 100,000 voter registration applications to process, Handel said. Her office will ensure that all applications are processed and verified for election day, she said.

As for the dispute with the Department of Justice, Handel’s spokesman, Matt Carrothers, said in a telephone interview Thursday night that his office is working with the attorney general to address the Justice Department questions. “We hope to have the answers soon,” he said.

Morales, who will graduate from Kennesaw State University in December with a bachelor’s degree in international affairs, became a U.S. citizen in November 2007.

He registered to vote last month, but about two weeks later, he received a letter from Cherokee County indicating he would not be able to vote unless he provided evidence of his citizenship, the lawsuit said. The letter also indicated Morales would be eliminated from the voter list if he did not prove his citizenship.

Morales went through the steps needed to prove his citizenship, including making a visit to the county Elections and Registrations Office and showing his passport to the clerk, the suit said. He was told he would soon be receiving his voter registration card in the mail. He received the card Oct. 3, the lawsuit said.

But on Tuesday, Morales received another letter from the office indicating he may not be qualified to vote because he may not be a U.S. citizen, the lawsuit said. It said if Morales did not contact the Cherokee Elections and Registration Office before Oct. 15 or appear at a court hearing on the same date, his name would be removed from the list of registered voters, the suit said.

“Despite all the steps he has gone through, Mr. Morales’ right to vote is still being threatened,” the lawsuit said. “Mr. Morales wants to vote, particularly in the upcoming election, and wants to make sure his vote is counted.”

Also representing Morales are the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the New York-Based Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and Atlanta attorney Brian Spears.

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.

Some counties, like Cobb and Cherokee, scheduled hearings where voters’ citizenship could be verified. Cobb County on Thursday canceled plans for those hearings, because of the Justice Department’s letter.

Cherokee County’s election office could not be reached for comment late Thursday.

In Cobb and Fulton counties, elections officers say they only got lists of voters with questionable citizenship in September, and they acted on them promptly.

Cobb County spokesman Robert Quigley said the Cobb elections office received notice Sept. 12 that it should look up a state report outlining voters whose citizenship was questioned.

Prior to that letter, the county didn’t know the report existed, said Beth Kish, Cobb’s voter registration manager.

“When we got the letter on the 12th, a lot of us called the secretary of state’s office and said, ‘Huh?’ ” Kish said.

The secretary of state’s office sent out another letter Sept. 24 to all counties clarifying what they should do to check citizenship.

Cobb County then sent out 234 letters to voters asking them to produce proof of citizenship or come to a hearing Oct. 13 to determine the matter.

In the meantime, 99 people mailed, faxed or personally brought documents that verified their citizenship to the Cobb office. Others never received the letter in the first place because they had moved, Quigley said.

Of those who did produce paperwork, five were actually born in the United States, Kish said.

No one was removed from the voter rolls as a result of the verification of citizenship, and no one presented false documents, Kish said.

Cobb County on Thursday sent out 135 letters notifying voters it had canceled the hearing next week.

“We made the decision to cancel this on our own,” Quigley said. “We knew it hadn’t been pre-cleared by the Department of Justice and it could be a problem,” he said.

Fulton County sent out 130 letters after it received the Sept. 24 letter from the secretary of state’s office, said April Pye, interim director of the Fulton County Department of Registration and Elections.

“That was the only list we have received from the secretary of state’s office,” Pye said. “I don’t know how often we were supposed to get them, or mail them out.”

Neville Wright, 54, and his wife, Dorothy Rodney-Wright, 54, new citizens from Jamaica, went to the Cobb elections office last week after Dorothy received a letter questioning her citizenship. The two were cleared, and on Thursday they cast their votes.

“I was a bit worried that I wouldn’t be able to vote,” said Dorothy, a day-care worker.

The state is also facing questions from the Social Security Administration over the state’s high volume of requests to verify voter identities. Georgia’s 2 million requests surpassed those of any other state. Only newly registered voters who did not have a valid state identification were supposed to be checked against the SSA database.

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.