Judge to weigh Ga. lawsuit over tossed mail-in ballots

Allegations that Georgia’s Republican-led election officials are unfairly throwing out mailed ballots over hyper-technical errors are set to go before a federal judge two weeks before Election Day.

Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of ballots are being rejected because voters’ signatures don’t appear to match the ones on file, or because the voter oath is signed on the wrong line, two lawsuits claim. And would-be voters don’t get a chance to fix the errors or provide explanations, they say.

The practice adopted by Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp has a lopsided impact on likely Democratic voters, according to the lawsuits — an allegation that carries extra significance because Kemp, a Republican, is running for governor Nov. 6 in one of the nation’s most-watched races.

The issue over signatures is separate from a lawsuit over Georgia’s “exactmatch” law that left more than 53,000 people off the voting rolls because there were minor discrepancies in information provided on registration applications and the voters’ government records.

A hearing is set for Monday and a ruling favoring the plaintiffs in the mail-in ballots’ case might help those in the bigger one.

Lawyers for the state in the absentee and mail-in ballot cases said in court filings that the plaintiffs, including a Democratic candidate for state office and Muslim and Asian groups represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, failed to identify any individual voters who hadn’t been given a chance to fix perceived errors.

Georgia says the state has already started the process of training election staff and early voting is underway.

“The Supreme Court has repeatedly recognized the importance of not upsetting a state’s election process with last-minute changes,” the state said.

But plaintiffs in one of the cases want a court order forcing Kemp to alert would-be voters by mail, telephone or email if their ballot applications are rejected and to explain why and how to address the issues. They also want signature deficiencies to be decided by a bipartisan review committee, saying age, disability and physical and mental condition are all possible reasons for signatures that don’t have an exact match. Signature rejections are also more likely to impact voters who speak English as a second language, they said.

At a joint hearing Tuesday in Atlanta, U.S. District Judge Leigh Martin May was to weigh the plaintiffs’ requests. Any decision by May, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, a Democrat, could find itself on a fast track to the U.S. Supreme Court, where Trump secured a conservative majority with the confirmation of Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

While one of the lawsuits calls the current practice a “constitutional train wreck,” Kemp says he’s preventing election fraud. Democrats say it’s a pretext for voter suppression.

Kemp’s opponent, Stacey Abrams, is the former minority leader of the Georgia House of Representatives and aims to be the first black female U.S. governor.

States need to have some means of verifying absentee voter identities to guard against ballots being intercepted and returned by others, said Rick Hasen, an election law professor at the University of California at Irvine.

“The problem is that signature matching is not an exact science and we know that even when officials try to do it fairly, peoples’ signatures change over time, so it’s not really a very accurate way of measuring someone’s identity,” he said.