Tens of thousands of Georgia voters updated their registration after Kamala Harris took over the Democratic campaign from president Joe Biden.
Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger had removed thousands of voter registrations for a variety of reasons, but 40,000 voters have already updated their registration ahead of the Oct. 7 deadline – and about a fourth of those did so on the day Harris rallied in Atlanta, according to an Atlanta Journal-Constitution analysis of the voter roll.
“These folks were registered before," said Lauren Groh-Wargo, CEO of voting rights organization Fair Fight Action. "They didn’t vote for a set of years. They decided to vote again, but they had to take that additional step and burden of reregistering.”
Groh-Wargo and other voting rights activists see those re-registrations as evidence of strong enthusiasm to vote this year, and both parties are seeing an uptick in activity.
“It’s not just first-time voters who are getting involved this cycle,” said Caitlin O’Dea, spokesperson for the GOP-led Greater Georgia. “After making over 100,000 phone calls, we’ve helped reregister many Georgians who haven’t voted in decades.”
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Voters were removed from the rolls for not voting or responding to mail from election officials in the past two general election cycles, while others were deleted for felony convictions or moving to another state, but many of them are eligible to register again in time to choose between Harris and Donald Trump.
“This maintenance isn’t evil,” said Mitchell Brown, a political scientist at Auburn University. “It’s good administrative practice.”
Election experts believe the presidential election has motivated many of those long-dormant voters to take part again, and that's certainly the case for 58-year-old Alan Overton, who updated his registration after moving back to Georgia from Florida and the start of this year so he could vote against Trump.
“A return to intelligence, a return to logic, a return to responsibility to your neighbors, a return to inclusiveness,” said Overton . “All these things that we just sort of took for granted when I was growing up.”
