by Ty Tagami | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger is initiating a four-year process that could delete the registrations of nearly a quarter million inactive voters.
“Clean voter rolls mean clean elections,” Raffensperger said Tuesday. “My promise to Georgia voters is elections that are free, fair, and fast – and we’re doing just that.”
Raffensperger’s agency will mail notices to 218,951 registered voters who have not participated since 2019. They will be scrubbed from the rolls in 2029 if they fail to respond by mail or by going online to update their status, and if they do not vote in either the 2026 or 2028 general elections.
(Voters can update their registration at the agency’s Online Voter Registration portal and My Voter Page, where they can also check whether they appear on the inactive list.)
The elections agency will soon roll out an address verification tool for use during registration.
Raffensperger has been trying to shore up confidence in Georgia’s election process, which has come under heavy criticism from supporters of President Donald Trump, who claimed without evidence that he lost the 2020 election due to cheating in Georgia.
Toward that end, Raffensperger also announced that a hand count of 282 “batches” of ballots in the recent Democratic primary runoff for the Georgia Public Service Commission had confirmed Peter Hubbard’s win over Keisha Sean Waites for District 3.
A batch comparison is one of several methods of auditing election results. It involves a comparison of hand count subtotals from identifiable batches of votes, such as from precincts, against the digital count, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
A batch comparison differs from a ballot-level count, which involves comparing randomly selected ballots to the results recorded by machines.
Georgia’s PSC runoff hand count varied from the machine count by two votes out of 13,917 cast. The inconsistency occurred in two of the batches and was within the “expected margin of human variation” and did not affect the outcome, Raffensperger’s office said.
