The Clarke County Board of Elections is one of several county election boards that will be investigated by a state-level body this month.
At a meeting Monday, members of the State Election Board (SEB) voted 3-0 to initiate an investigation into the election boards of Clarke, Cobb, Fulton, Forsyth, Gwinnett, Bibb, Dekalb Counties. The chairman of the SEB, Mike Cohen, will investigate how the boards deal with voter registration challenges initiated by citizens.
Georgia citizens are allowed to challenge the registration status of voters under a law passed in 2020.
Rocky Raffle, chairman of Clarke County’s Board of Elections, said Tuesday morning that the body had not received any mass challenges since 2020. Recent challenges in Clarke County have numbered in the single digits, and many of those challenges proved to be accurate based on the evidence presented. Those individuals were removed from the county’s rolls, according to Raffle.
The SEB’s decision came after multiple political activists from around the state testified that county election boards were unlawfully dismissing their challenges of registered voters. In some cases, those activists had filed challenges of thousands of names.
Dr. Janice Johnston, member of the SEB, initiated discussion of the investigation.
“It appears that there’s some sort of process going on with blanket refusals to accept a challenge or investigate a challenge.”
The SEB also moved to invite county election officials to the board’s next meeting on October 8th, where they will be asked to provide information about their registration challenge policies.
This article comes to Now Habersham in partnership with WUGA News
