Voter registration efforts reshape the Georgia electorate
By TOM CRAWFORD | Published: OCTOBER 23, 2014
One of the biggest stories of this election year in Georgia has been the battle over registering new voters – a fight that is headed for a Friday morning hearing in Fulton County Superior Court.
There have been concerted, ongoing efforts this year by several activist organizations to register more blacks, Latinos and Asians to vote – a move that reflects the growth of each of those demographic groups in a rapidly diversifying state.
The results of these registration drives are showing up in the latest statistics released by the secretary of state’s office.
There have been just over 183,000 voters added to the state’s rolls since March 1. About one-third of the new voters — 61,779 — are white, while the other two-thirds consist of African Americans (67,500), Hispanics (7,550), Asians (5,094) and another 41,493 voters who are classified as “other” or “unknown.”
“The power of the Latino vote is growing and we want to make sure that growing Latino power is felt on election day,” said Jerry Gonzalez, executive director of the Georgia Association of Latino Elected Officials (GALEO).
Helen Kim Ho, the director of Asian Americans Advancing Justice – Atlanta, said one of her organization’s major tasks since its formation in 2010 has been to register voters from the Asian community.
“No (political) party is going to do that – they have a limited amount of time and they’re going to focus their efforts on the people who are already on the rolls,” she said. “It’s our job to register people.”
The registration initiative attracting the most attention has been the New Georgia Project, which was founded by state Rep. Stacey Abrams (D-Atlanta) and has tried to register more than 85,000 people, most of them minority voters, this year.
Secretary of State Brian Kemp, a Republican, accused the project of voter registration fraud last month and launched an investigation into their activities. Kemp says that somewhere between 50 and 100 of the application forms the group turned in were forged or otherwise suspicious.
Abrams and her supporters say Kemp’s accusation was intended to have a chilling effect on their registration activities, and thus amounted to voter suppression. They subsequently sued Kemp in Fulton Superior Court over the processing of 40,000 applications from people they contend have yet to show up on the voter rolls.
“These are voters who deserve to have their voices heard,” Abrams said. “Secretary Kemp repeatedly refused to meet to discuss these processing issues, and absent transparency from his office, we were forced to pursue legal action to ensure Georgians’ right to vote.”
Kemp said the lawsuit is “frivolous” and maintained that his office has sent every registration application to the appropriate county election office to be verified and processed.
“The claim that there are over 40,000 unprocessed voter registration applications is absolutely false,” Kemp said. “The counties have processed all the voter registration applications that they have received for the general election.”
The status of the disputed voter applications may be clarified at Friday’s court hearing scheduled by Judge Chris Brasher.
Regardless of what ruling the judge may make, Georgia’s electorate is slowly but steadily becoming less white and more racially diverse. The state’s share of white registered voters declines by roughly 1 percent a year and there is a corresponding increase in the percentage of non-white voters.
The percentage of white voters in Georgia has now shrunk to about 58 percent, while the percentage of black voters is nearly 30 percent and the remainder is made up of Latinos, Asians, and the “unknown” registrants.
The secretary of state’s office currently classifies 89,102 registered voters as Hispanic, but Gonzalez said that number is understated because many Latinos are classified in the “white” or “other” racial categories.
“When we do a surname match, we find that Latino voters are undercounted by 30 to 40 percent,” Gonzalez said. “I would put that number as anywhere between 200,000 and 220,000 Latino voters.”
The diversifying electorate has prompted many predictions that Georgia, whose government is firmly controlled by the Republican Party, may one day become less of a red state and more of a purple state.
“In the past, people saw Georgia as a lost cause, or they used to,” Ho said. “After the 2012 presidential election, and the results and the breakout of which group voted and for who, it seemed pretty clear Georgia could turn purple.”
© 2014 by The Georgia Report Posted with permission by the GA Report.
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