Far-right activists are fighting to purge voter registration rolls ahead of the 2024 presidential election — and eligible voters are getting caught in the crosshairs, reported CBS News on Monday.
"Fueled by doubts about the 2020 election, an army of conservative activists is poring over state voter lists, looking for registration errors that can be used to file what are known as voter challenges — questioning the registrations of thousands of Americans," reported Michael Kaplan, Major Garrett, and Sheena Samu. "The undertaking, which includes the involvement of a lawyer tied to former President Trump's alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election, tends to affect minority or younger voters who may be statistically more likely to vote Democrat, according to local election officials."
The voters receiving challenges are disproportionately younger and people of color. One such person caught up in the purge effort was James McWhorter, an Army vet from Atlanta who registered with the address of the barbershop where he worked because he was homeless at the time — and got accused of fraud by Gail Lee, an activist he says he never met.
Georgia, the report noted, "became ground zero for the movement after Republicans in the state pushed through a law in 2021 allowing citizens to file an unlimited number of challenges against fellow voters within their own county."
CBS analysts found that, since the law was passed, "more than 80,000 challenges have been filed against Georgia voters — many of them by a loose network of about a dozen conservative activists."
That Georgia voting law became a national controversy over several of its provisions, including one that prohibited giving water to voters standing in line.
Involved in the effort to enforce the voter challenges is Cleta Mitchell, a Trump-backed lawyer, who was recommended for indictment in the Georgia racketeering case against the former president but was ultimately not charged. Mitchell, a longtime proponent of election conspiracy theories who has also sought to restrict voting on college campuses, recently stepped down from a federal advisory board that creates voluntary nationwide election standards.
