Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp has agreed to restore tens of thousands of names to state voter registration rolls in the face of a federal lawsuit accusing him of disenfranchising minorities ahead of the presidential election.
The move comes as the state works toward a possible settlement in the lawsuit which was filed earlier this month by the NAACP and other civil rights groups.
READ: Suit alleges Georgia blocked thousands of minority voters
As a result, those whose voter registration applications have been rejected since October 1, 2014, may be allowed to vote on November 8. The state also has agreed to stop automatically rejecting applications that don’t exactly match information in the state driver’s license and Social Security databases.
Previously, if a single letter, number, hyphen, space or apostrophe was misplaced or missing and the applicant failed to correct it within 40 days of being notified, the application was automatically cancelled. Plaintiffs argue that process violates the federal Voting Rights Act.
According to the Atlanta Journal Constitution, Georgia denied 34,874 registration applications between 2013 to 2016 due to mismatched information. The lawsuit claims blacks were eight times more likely to fail the state’s voter verification process than whites and Latinos and Asian-Americans were six times more likely to fail.
In a letter to U.S. District Judge William O’Kelley, the state Attorney General’s Office says Kemp is voluntarily restoring names and suspending cancellations to avoid any unexpected emergency measures imposed by the court as the lawsuit moves forward.
