Big Georgia county to start charging some costs to people who challenge the eligibility of voters
ATLANTA– An election commission in one of Georgia’s largest counties has decided to make people who challenge a voter’s eligibility to vote pay for the cost of notifying the contested voter.
The Cobb County Board of Elections and Registrations voted 4-1 Tuesday to adopt the rule. Debbie Fisher, a Republican member of the board, was the lone vote against the rule.
Republican activists are challenging thousands of voters in Georgia as part of a a broad national effort coordinated by Donald Trump’s Allies to remove names from the voting rolls. Most of the people they target have moved from their old addresses, and activists argue that leaving those names on the rolls invites fraud. But Democrats and liberal voting rights activists argue that Republicans are daring voters to remove Democrats or sow doubt on the accuracy of the elections ahead of the 2024 presidential election.
Democrats have pushed to charge a fee for each challenge filed, partly as an effort to discourage people from targeting hundreds or thousands of voters using software programs like EagleAI or IV3 that allow for mass challenges. A 2021 Georgia law specifically says that one person can file a unlimited number of voters in their own province.
In the Atlanta suburb of Cobb County, a once Republican stronghold that now boasts Democratic majorities, the board voted only to charge for printing the challenge notice and for postage to mail it, which will likely be less than a dollar per challenge. But the cost could add up. Tate Fall, Cobb County’s elections director, estimates it cost about $1,600 to mail the notices from a batch of 2,472 challenges filed last month.
Democrats also wanted counties to charge challengers for the time staff spends investigating and processing challenges. But Daniel White, an attorney for the board, said Tuesday that he concluded the board could not do that unless state law was changed to specifically authorize it. However, he said he concluded the board has the inherent authority to charge for sending notices, just as a court has the inherent authority to charge someone for serving notice of a lawsuit on defendants.
“When you’re talking about 3,000 voters who have to cast their ballots and you find that you have to go to 3,000 voters who have to cast their ballots, the costs go up dramatically,” White said.
But Republicans opposed the measure, with Fisher calling it “outrageous” and “simply wrong” to charge people to exercise their challenge rights.
Cobb County Republican Party Chair Salleigh Grubbs said the board is failing to do its job of ensuring fair voter rolls while challengers help them do so.
“If the Electoral Council makes people pay for doing their job, that is a disgrace,” said Grubbs.
The board also adopted other rules around challenges, saying it will not accept challenges against people who have already been moved to the inactive voter rolls. For people who have been moved, federal law says Georgia can cancel an inactive registration only if a voter fails to respond to a mailing and then fails to vote in two subsequent federal general elections. That process takes years. Challengers have targeted inactive voters for quicker removal.
Counties make rules because the state has not set guidelines for counties on how to handle challenges. That leads to differences in how counties handle the same types of challenges.
An Associated Press survey of Georgia’s 40 largest counties found that more than 18,000 voters were required to cast ballots in 2023 and 2024, although most precincts did cast ballots. Hundreds of thousands more were contested in 2020, 2021 and 2022.
A new law that took effect July 1, could lead to an increase in challenges by making it easier for challengers to comply with the law’s requirement to remove someone. Some groups have filed a lawsuit to block the Georgia measure, claiming it violates federal law.