A spokesman for Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp verified Thursday that all voter registration applications received by the state’s Oct. 9 registration deadline were sent to the proper county within a week.
That leaves the onus on individual counties to confirm how they handled the applications of almost 300 new voters who appear to be missing from voting rolls less than a week before Election Day.
The state review came a day after a legal advocacy group asked Kemp on Wednesday to help check the status of some of the more than 1,430 residents — many of whom are newly naturalized American citizens — it had helped register to vote in the Nov. 6 presidential election.
The Asian American Legal Advocacy Center said its form-by-form review discovered 292 applicants had not been processed as of Tuesday. Center staff then confirmed its numbers by checking the secretary of state’s My Voter Page website and calling different county election offices.
A majority of unprocessed applications involved Fulton County, where 139 voters did not appear in the rolls. Other counties affected include Gwinnett (47 voters), DeKalb (24 voters) and Cobb (19 voters). While it remains unclear on the county level what went wrong, Kemp spokesman Jared Thomas said Thursday the state did its job.
“It is our policy to deliver voter registration applications to the proper counties within 24-48 hours of receipt in our office,” Thomas said. “During crunch times as the voter registration deadline approaches … this time can increase. However, any applications that were received by our office within the Oct. 9 deadline were sent to the proper county by Oct. 15.”
Thomas said any applications received after the deadline were and are still delivered to local elections officials. There is no guarantee they will be processed in time.
Fulton elections Interim Director Sharon Mitchell said Thursday her office still has hundreds of applications to process. She said they just received two boxes from the state Tuesday, and that her staff still has about 1,500 applications to key in.
Officials from Cobb, DeKalb and Gwinnett were not sure Wednesday what happened, believing they met a state deadline late last week to process registration applications. They said anyone who can’t verify registration should call their local elections office. If the issue isn’t worked out by Nov. 6, they may still cast a provisional ballot.
About the Author
