A federal judge has set a hearing for 10 a.m. Friday in Savannah over a lawsuit seeking to reopen Georgia's voter registration due to Hurricane Matthew.
Voter advocates filed the suit just before midnight Wednesday, arguing that an emergency extension of the registration deadline was needed because some coastal residents forced to flee last weekend’s storm did not have enough opportunity to submit applications.
The suit requests an extension through next Wednesday for residents of Chatham County, where local government offices were closed for what would have been the last six days of the voter registration period that ended Tuesday. It also suggests that the extension could be made available to residents statewide.
Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp, the state's top elections official, had urged residents in the path of the storm last week to take advantage of the state's online and mobile voter registration access points. He traveled Wednesday to coastal Georgia to check on election preparations ahead of the Nov. 8 presidential contest, and his office said he was encouraged by the tour and believes local officials are good to go with early voting set to begin Monday.
His spokeswoman, Candice Broce, said Kemp had initiated a number of registration awareness efforts, including outreach to voting-age high schoolers. He recently released voter education videos in several languages and has actively touted new ways to register — including a pilot program this year allowing residents to register via text.
“We have been preparing for this election for over a year, and the office’s ramped-up outreach efforts on social and traditional media have delivered incredible results,” Broce said. “For these reasons, we find it difficult to reconcile these groups’ claims against what we have seen and heard in our service to Georgians across the state.
Filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Georgia, the suit noted that Chatham, which includes Savannah, has more than 203,000 residents of voting age and that more than 40 percent of them are African-Americans and Latinos — groups historically underrepresented on the voting rolls.
The county was one of six under a mandatory evacuation order in advance of the hurricane, and the homes of more than half its residents lost power during the storm. Several communities within the county, such as Tybee Island, suffered widespread property damage and flooding.
Sabrina German, with the Chatham County Voter Registration Office, said Thursday that the office had remained shuttered for the final two days of Georgia’s registration period because Chatham’s Board of Commissioners “closed the entire county on Monday and Tuesday.”
The county had the option of seeking a local judicial order to extend the registration deadline for its residents, but it did not do so.
Kemp in a statement released last Thursday ahead of the storm noted a number of election registration offices had closed in coastal counties, and that the hurricane may delay mail service in some areas, potentially also delaying processing of paper voter registration applications. But he also did not offer to extend Tuesday's deadline.
The complaint, which names both Kemp and Gov. Nathan Deal as defendants, alleges that by failing to extend the deadline, the state violated residents’ constitutional right to vote as well as provisions of the National Voter Registration Act that require states to receive and process voter registration forms 30 days prior to Election Day.
The Georgia NAACP, the Georgia Coalition for the Peoples’ Agenda and the New Georgia Project brought the suit, with help from the national Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. The groups all said in the suit that the storm and related office closures forced them to cancel or curtail planned registration efforts in Chatham that otherwise could have resulted in people joining the voter rolls.
“Folks should not be punished for where they live, and a mandatory evacuation should not be an excuse,” said Nse Ufot, the New Georgia Project’s executive director, whose group announced Thursday that it had helped register more than 123,000 Georgians since the March 1 presidential primary.
The group had been working with some Chatham residents whose registrations were incomplete or who had been kicked off the rolls and needed to re-register. With the county registration office closed through Tuesday, Ufot said, “we weren’t able to continue that work, and time was of the essence.”
The extraordinary circumstance of such a major storm disrupting services so close to the registration deadlines for states including Georgia, Florida and South Carolina has been subject to intense debate over the past several days.
A number of Georgia advocates over the weekend of the storm had expressed concerns about the state’s impending deadline, saying coastal residents fleeing the storm — including more than 500,000 people under mandatory evacuation — would not have the time and resources to meet it.
In Florida, where a mandatory evacuation forced more than 1.5 million residents away from the coast, a similar lawsuit prompted a federal judge on Wednesday to order an extension of the state’s voter registration deadline by a week — until next Tuesday.
South Carolina voluntarily extended its original voter registration deadline — which was supposed to have been last Saturday — into this week as the storm approached.
In North Carolina, where severe flooding caused by the storm has left several coastal counties underwater, state election officials announced Wednesday that they planned to keep their voter registration deadline this Friday.
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