Settlement of Georgia’s “Exact Match” voter registration lawsuit announced

The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, Project Vote, Campaign Legal Center, Voting Rights Institute at the Georgetown University Law Center, along with the New York City office of Hughes Hubbard & Reed LLP and Atlanta-based firm of Caplan Cobb LLP, acting as pro bono counsel, announced on Friday, Feb. 10, 2017, a settlement today in a lawsuit filed on behalf Asian Americans Advancing Justice – Atlanta, the Georgia Coalition for the Peoples’ Agenda and the Georgia State Conference of the NAACP, which challenged Georgia’s exact-match voter registration verification scheme. The suit alleged Georgia’s “exact match” system violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and deprived eligible Georgians of their fundamental right to vote under the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution, and resulted in Georgia restoring more than 42,000 previously purged voters to the rolls.

“This important victory ensures that tens of thousands of voters will not be disenfranchised by Georgia’s “no match, no vote” policy, which unnecessarily denied people the opportunity to register to vote,” said Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. “We will continue to fight ongoing voting discrimination and barriers to the ballot box. Now is the time for focus on policies that can help make voting easier in Georgia and across the nation.”

The complaint, which was filed in September 2016 in the United States District Court for