The election director in the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office resigned Friday after “a technical error” resulted in nearly 8,000 voters being transferred from “inactive” to “canceled” status six days after a key federal deadline in the run-up to last year’s May 20 primaries.
At least one of those voters then faced a problem trying to vote, according to Secretary of State Brian Kemp and his office’s investigators. The young woman from Richmond County was told at the time that she needed to re-register when she visited her polling precinct. It is unclear whether she ever cast a ballot last spring.
The news cast a pall over an agency that just last year found itself embroiled in controversy over its handling of voter records. It represents a violation by the state of the National Voter Registration Act, which requires certain reports to be completed no later than 90 days before a federal election.
It also set voting rights advocates on edge — Julie Houk of the national Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights under Law said it was an apparent “illegal purge” of voters.
Kemp said that Linda Ford stepped down at his urging on Friday. She will be temporarily replaced by Ann Hicks, the agency’s former elections director who had retired.
“It was an honest mistake by a hardworking person and, unfortunately, she has to pay the price,” Kemp said. “Linda and I go back a long way. But I have a duty to uphold the integrity of the system, and this was one of those lines that were crossed. It can’t be tolerated.”
Kemp’s staff discovered the violation in January, after they started looking at the records that had been requested by Project Vote. It was mid-March, however, when they realized they had a big problem. They then turned everything over to internal investigators, who completed their review Wednesday.
Kemp’s office does routine work to keep the voter registration rolls up to date. That works includes a process to review how often a voter participates in elections — if the voter has had no contact with election officials for three years, has filed a change of address for outside his or her county or has had election-related mail returned to sender, elections officials will send a notice to ask if that person is still interested.
After a period of time, voters who don’t respond are considered “inactive.” Two general election cycles after that, if they still haven’t been heard from, those voters are “canceled.” Such was the case early last year, when Ford and other staffers conducted what was supposed to be their last federal voter registration review on Feb. 19, 2014, and moved about 312,000 voters to canceled status.
But an investigation by Kemp’s office revealed that six days later, an additional 7,690 voters were moved from inactive to canceled status. The change was conducted within 90 days of an election — thereby in violation of the federal deadline. Most of the affected voters lived in Richmond County, although the problem involved other counties as well.
On Friday, Kemp said the process had nothing to do with last year’s lawsuit over claims from a voter advocacy group that 40,000 voters were “missing” from the rolls. A state judge in October dismissed a lawsuit by the Lawyers’ Committee and other groups who wanted the court to intervene in Georgia’s voter registration process.
Those groups, however, have continued to review the process for additional legal action. Kemp’s office, in the meantime, has also had other problems, including on Election Day in November when hundreds of voters reported trouble trying to access the state’s online “my voter page” to confirm their registration or find their polling place. The glitch did not affect the state’s computerized voting system, and officials said it did not prevent anyone from voting.
Kemp said those events had nothing to do with his decision regarding Ford, adding that “if she remained, she would become a scapegoat.”
“I have to make sure the people know that my biggest duty in the office is to maintain the integrity of the system,” Kemp said.
Former Georgia Secretary of State Lewis Massey said Kemp made the right move.
“Making a change in key staff positions is never easy, but Brian believes the integrity of the election process must be protected,” Massey said. “I commend him for making a tough choice that is the right one given the circumstances.”
But Francys Johnson, the president of the Georgia NAACP, said the timing of the news — on the day after the 2015 legislative session ended — struck him as odd. It was Kemp’s fault, he said, for offering Ford “as a sacrificial lamb.”
State investigators concluded that the mistake was a result of both human error and a technical problem. A programming script designed to flag inactive voters missed some records. And Ford, investigators said, didn’t realize that missing the deadline would violate federal law, an oversight that “erodes the integrity” of the state elections office, they said.
Kemp said he has ordered a review to ensure it doesn’t happen again, including new legal safeguards and a new information technology process.
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