County in Georgia to restore black voters’ rights

ATLANTA — Election officials in Georgia’s sparsely populated, overwhelmingly black Hancock County agreed Wednesday to restore voting rights to dozens of African-American registered voters they disenfranchised ahead of a racially divided local election.

About three-quarters of the people they removed from the voting rolls — nearly all of them black — still live in the voting district and will be restored to the county’s registered voter list under the settlement.

“We want to make sure that a purge program like the one that played out in the fall of 2015 never happens again,” said Kristen Clarke, executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, which sued the county in federal court.

Hancock County Board of Elections members maintain that they weren’t targeting or trying to intimidate black voters by sending sheriff’s deputies to summon people to appear before them and prove they lived in the county.

Board members said they were complying with Georgia law, which allows any voter to challenge another’s eligibility, and requires that a sheriff or deputy deliver documents in a voter registration challenge, said their lawyer, Mike O’Quinn.

“Nobody in Hancock County is trying to turn the clock back and discriminate against African-Americans contrary to what some news media has reported in this case,” O’Quinn said.

The methods they used would have required federal pre-approval if the Supreme Court hadn’t struck down provisions of the Voting Rights Act two years earlier. The justices ruled that federal oversight is no longer necessary in many places, but advocates say purges of voter registration lists remain common across the South, particularly in rural and poor areas.