COBB COUNTY, Ga. — The board of elections in one of metro Atlanta’s largest counties says it will start charging people who challenge the eligibility of voters.
At the week’s meeting, the Cobb County Board of Elections for 4-1 on the measure, with a Republican member voting against the move.
The new rule comes as Republican activists are challenging thousands of voters in Georgia as part of a wide-ranging national effort coordinated by former President Donald Trump’s allies to take names off voting rolls.
Most of the people they are targeting have moved away from their old addresses, and the activists argue that letting those names stay on the rolls invites fraud.
But Democrats and liberal voting rights activists argue Republicans are challenging voters either to remove Democrats or to sow doubt about the accuracy of elections in advance of the 2024 presidential election.
Democrats have been pushing to start charging for each challenge filed, in part as an effort to deter people from targeting hundreds or thousands of voters using software programs such as EagleAI or IV3 that facilitate mass challenges.
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A 2021 Georgia law specifically says one person can challenge an unlimited number of voters in their own county.
The board voted to charge for the cost of printing the challenge notice and for postage to mail it, likely to be less than a dollar per challenge.
But that could add up. Cobb County Elections Director Tate Fall estimated that it cost about $1,600 to mail out notices from one batch of 2,472 challenges filed last month.
Democrats have also wanted counties to charge challengers for staff time to research and process challenges.
But Daniel White, a lawyer for the board, said Tuesday that he concluded that the board couldn’t do that unless state law is changed to grant specific authorization.
However, he said he concluded the board has the inherent power to charge for sending notices, in the same way, a court has the inherent power to charge someone for serving notice of a lawsuit on the defendants.
“If you’re talking about 3,000 voters being challenged and notice having to go out to 3,000 voters being challenged, that really increases your costs,” White said.
But Republicans opposed the measure. Debbie Fisher, a Republican member of the board, called the measure “egregious” and “just wrong” to charge people for exercising their challenge rights.
Cobb County Republican Party Chairwoman Salleigh Grubbs said the board is failing to do its job of ensuring clean voter rolls, while challengers are stepping in to help.
“When the Board of Elections is trying to charge people for doing the job they should be doing, that’s a disgrace,” Grubbs said.
Counties are making rules in part because the state hasn’t issued guidelines to counties on handling challenges. That’s leading to differences in how counties handle the same types of challenges.
A new law that took effect July 1 could lead to a surge in challenges by making it easier for challengers to meet the legal burden of removing someone. Some groups have sued to block the Georgia measure, arguing it violates federal law.
The Associated Press contributed to this article.
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