In surprise ruling, Judge Leslie Abrams Gardner just reversed a decision from earlier this week that prevented two Georgia counties from removing over 4,000 voters from their rolls who moved away. Her new decision allows the counties to mandate the use provisional ballots for these voters if they are indeed voting:
POLITICO – A federal judge has agreed to allow a Georgia county to require that certain voters cast provisional ballots, just days before two runoff elections in the state that will decide control of the U.S. Senate.
More than 4,000 voters faced eligibility challenges ahead of the Jan. 5 runoffs based on unverified postal change-of-address records. The new injunction from U.S. District Court Judge Leslie Abrams Gardner, issued just before midnight on Wednesday, replaces an earlier restraining order she had issued that prevented Muscogee County from forcing those voters to cast provisional ballots at all. The latest order represents a significant move in the direction the county board urged during a court hearing earlier Wednesday.
Although the county may now require provisional ballots from those voters, Gardner’s order directs that no challenges to their eligibility be upheld based exclusively on data in the National Change of Address Registry, a U.S. Postal Service database that Democrats have worried is an unreliable and unverified indicator of whether individuals have changed their legal residence.
Her order also requires Muscogee County to notify any voters for whom it finds such evidence of ineligibility and give them a chance to present evidence to count their ballot by Jan. 8.
After a two hour hearing yesterday, Gardner decided that the Democrat group who filed the lawsuit wasn’t likely to succeed in challenging the ineligibility of these voters:
The judge’s latest order on the matter represented a significant rollback of her initial restriction on Muscogee, which prevented the county from requiring the challenged voters to cast provisional ballots at all. The original restraining order prompted condemnation from Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and drew the attention of figures such as Donald Trump Jr., who called out her connection to Abrams to fan allegations of bias.
Gardner’s order followed a two-hour hearing Wednesday on a lawsuit filed last week by Majority Forward over an attempt to challenge more than 4,000 voters in Muscogee and another 150 in Ben Hill County right before Tuesday’s election. Gardner determined that Majority Forward did not demonstrate it was likely to succeed on its challenge to Ben Hill’s decision and focused her final order only on Muscogee.
Well I must say I’m shocked she reversed her original decision, but it’s the right decision. Although I doubt Attorney Marac Elias thinks so. He had said her original ruling was a “victory over voter suppression.”