Black Voters Matter Fund and two union groups are pressing Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in federal court to turn over complete records on a 2025 voter-roll purge that cancelled nearly 471,000 registrations, arguing his office has stonewalled a legally required records request for more than a year. The case, filed Feb. 27, 2026, centers not on whether Georgia could purge inactive voters — federal law allows that — but on whether Raffensperger’s office is complying with transparency requirements that let the public check the purge’s accuracy.
How the Purge Unfolded
In July 2025, Raffensperger announced what his office called an audit of Georgia’s voter rolls, sending cancellation notices to roughly 480,000 voters flagged as “inactive.” The office used several criteria to identify those voters, including National Change of Address data suggesting a move, mail that had been returned as undeliverable, a lack of any contact with election officials for five years, and indications a voter had left the state. By the time the process concluded, nearly 471,000 registrations had been cancelled — about 6% of Georgia’s registered voters, according to the case record.
The Records Fight
In September 2025, Black Voters Matter Fund submitted a request under the National Voter Registration Act’s public-inspection provision, seeking documentation on how the purge list was compiled and implemented. Plaintiffs say Raffensperger’s office responded with only a limited spreadsheet covering a narrow set of data fields, leaving most of the underlying records — the methodology, vendor data, and verification steps behind individual cancellations — unproduced. The lawsuit asks a federal judge to order full compliance with the NVRA’s disclosure requirements, arguing the public cannot verify whether eligible voters were mistakenly swept up without seeing the underlying work.
Raffensperger’s Response
Raffensperger’s office moved to dismiss the case on March 27, 2026, arguing the complaint fails to state a valid claim. Court records show the office made a supplemental document production in May 2026, though the specifics of that production aren’t detailed in public case filings, and the docket does not yet reflect a ruling on the motion to dismiss. The secretary’s office has consistently defended list-maintenance efforts as routine and legally mandated housekeeping rather than a partisan tool, pointing to the NVRA’s own requirement that states periodically remove ineligible registrations.
Why Georgia’s Roll-Maintenance History Matters
Plaintiffs situate the current dispute in a longer pattern. Georgia removed more than 300,000 voters from its rolls in 2019, a purge that later reporting found had swept up many voters who were, in fact, still eligible. A 2020 ACLU investigation separately concluded that nearly 200,000 of those removals relied on flawed address-change data. Voting-rights advocates argue that history is exactly why full transparency on the 2025 purge’s methodology matters: without the underlying records, it’s difficult for outside groups to independently confirm whether the current purge avoided the same errors.
The Broader Stakes for Voters
Advocacy groups say large-scale list-maintenance purges carry disproportionate risk for certain voters — young people, voters of color, and people who move frequently, all of whom are more likely to be flagged by change-of-address or inactivity screens even when they remain eligible and intend to vote at their current address. For voters who discover near an election that their registration was cancelled, the practical remedy is often a same-day provisional ballot or an emergency re-registration, options that vary by state and can still result in disenfranchisement if voters don’t learn about the cancellation until they arrive at the polls.
What’s Next
With Raffensperger’s motion to dismiss still pending, the case’s near-term trajectory depends on how the federal court rules on whether Black Voters Matter’s NVRA claim can proceed. If the judge allows the case forward, discovery could force Georgia to produce the detailed purge methodology and data plaintiffs say they’ve been denied, a process that would likely stretch well past the November 2026 election. If the suit survives and succeeds, it could set a precedent requiring more granular public disclosure the next time Georgia — or any state covered by the NVRA — runs a large-scale voter-roll cleanup. For the roughly 471,000 Georgians whose registrations were already cancelled, the practical path back onto the rolls generally requires re-registering before the state’s deadline for the next election, since a successful records lawsuit would affect future transparency rather than automatically restore registrations already removed.
Photo: FightHIVinDC / BY via flickr
