ATLANTA (AP) — An election board in one of Georgia’s largest counties has decided to charge people who challenge voters’ eligibility for the cost of notifying the challenged voters.
The Cobb County Board of Elections and Registration voted 4-1 to implement the rule on Tuesday. Debbie Fisher, a Republican member of the board, was the only one to vote against the rule.
Republican activists are urging thousands of voters in Georgia to remove names from the voting rolls as part of a sweeping national effort coordinated by Donald Trump’s allies. Most of the people they are targeting have moved from their old addresses, and the activists argue that leaving those names on the rolls invites voter fraud. But Democrats and liberal voting rights activists argue that Republicans are asking voters to either remove Democrats or sow doubt about the veracity of the election ahead of the 2024 presidential election.
Democrats are pushing to charge fees for each objection filed, in part to discourage people from targeting hundreds or thousands of voters using software programs like EagleAI or IV3 that allow mass objections. A 2021 Georgia law explicitly says a person can challenge an unlimited number of voters in their own district.
In suburban Atlanta’s Cobb County, a former Republican stronghold that now produces Democratic majorities, the board has only charged for the cost of printing the notice of objection and the postage to mail it, which is believed to be less than a dollar per objection. But that could add up. Tate Fall, Cobb County’s election supervisor, estimated that mailing the objections from a batch of 2,472 appeals filed last month cost about $1,600.
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Democrats also wanted counties to charge plaintiffs for the time staff gave them to research and work on the lawsuits. But Daniel White, a lawyer for the panel, said Tuesday he concluded that the panel could not do that unless state law was changed and special authorization was granted. But he concluded that the panel had the authority to charge for sending notices, just as a court has the authority to charge someone for serving notice of a lawsuit on the defendant.
“When you talk about challenging 3,000 voters and you find that you have to target 3,000 voters, that really increases your costs,” White said.
But Republicans rejected the measure. Fisher called it “outrageous” and “just wrong” to charge people for exercising their right to object.
Salleigh Grubbs, chairwoman of the Cobb County Republican Party, said the board is failing in its mission to ensure clean voter rolls while challengers step in to help.
“It’s a disgrace when the Election Board tries to take money from people for work they’re supposed to be doing,” Grubbs said.
The committee also adopted different rules for challenges, saying it will not accept challenges from people already placed on the inactive voter list. For people already placed on the inactive voter list, federal law states that Georgia can only delete an inactive registration if a voter does not respond to a mailing campaign and then does not vote in two subsequent federal elections. That process takes years. Challengers target inactive voters for faster deletion.
One reason counties are enacting rules is because the state has not given them guidelines on how to handle challenges, which leads to counties handling the same type of challenges differently.
An Associated Press poll of Georgia’s 40 largest counties found that more than 18,000 electoral votes were contested in 2023 and 2024, even though the counties rejected most of the challenges. Hundreds of thousands more were contested in 2020, 2021 and 2022.
A new law that took effect July 1 could lead to a surge in lawsuits by making it easier for plaintiffs to meet the legal requirements to remove someone. Some groups have filed suit to block the measure in Georgia, saying it violates federal law.
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