ACLU sends Cobb, Gwinnett complaint letters over notice sent to voters

A voter casts his ballot in Georgia’s 6th Congressional District special election at a polling site in Sandy Springs, Ga., Tuesday, June 20, 2017. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

A voter casts his ballot in Georgia’s 6th Congressional District special election at a polling site in Sandy Springs, Ga., Tuesday, June 20, 2017. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

The ACLU of Georgia has sent two more counties letters threatening legal action over address confirmation notices that have gone out to hundreds of thousands of residents across metro Atlanta and the state.

The letters, sent over the weekend to Cobb and Gwinnett counties, follows a similar complaint made last week to Fulton County over the notice’s course of action. The notice says a voter will be declared “inactive” if they don’t respond within 30 days. The ACLU says voters who have moved within the same county they were already registered in shouldn’t face such a course of action.

The group has taken no issue to the mailer going to people who have moved outside their county, either to somewhere else in Georgia or to another state. But it says voters who move within the same county should not face the possibility of being declared “inactive” because state law doesn’t mandate such an action for that particular group of voters. The ACLU said it believes it also goes beyond what’s federally allowed.

The notices are part of Georgia’s biennial effort to clean up the state’s voter rolls. They are generated after the state compares the list of people who submitted a change of address form to the U.S. Postal Service with the state’s overall list of registered voters. In Georgia, so-called “inactive” voters are still legally registered to vote in Georgia, have full access to the ballot and can vote as usual.

To find out more about the notices and why Georgia uses them, read Monday's print edition of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution or visit myAJC.com on Sunday.