Georgia’s 2018 midterm election was plagued by election integrity concerns

By Jennifer Cohn
April 29, 2021

In Georgia’s 2018 gubernatorial election, Democrat Stacey Abrams ran against Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State, Brian Kemp.

In the runup to the election, Kemp’s office purged 560,000 voters from the voter rolls under the state’s “use it or lose it” policy, which dubiously assumes that a voter must have moved or died if, over the course of three years, they don’t respond to a notice (or otherwise tell the state that they haven’t moved or died) and then fail to vote in two federal election cycles. According to APM Reports, “the process takes seven years.”

An analysis conducted by APM Reports found that more than 100,000 of the 560,000 purged Georgia voters had not moved or died. There is no way to know how many of them didn’t vote because they had been purged.

Another concern in the run-up to the midterm election was that the state had closed 214 polling locations since 2012. The Atlanta Journal Constitution would later report that “[p]recinct closures and longer distances likely prevented an estimated 54,000 to 85,000 voters from casting ballots” in Georgia’s midterm election.

Election security advocates also had concerns about the state’s paperless voting…