The changing face of voter suppression: How SB 189 cleared the way for mass challenges in Georgia

Candace Smith did everything right.

During the May 2024 state primary in Georgia, the Atlanta attorney voted early, giving herself time to sort out any issues that might occur and ensure that her vote would be counted.

But on Election Day, when she went to check her ballot status online, a warning popped up. Someone had submitted a challenge to her voter registration status.

“I found it shocking,” Smith said, adding that she has been an active voter in Fulton County for decades, and that the challenge did not include any reason or evidence. “Nothing about it made any sense.”

Smith, an attorney and longtime proponent of voting rights efforts in Georgia, was well positioned to advocate for her rights. She quickly contacted the Fulton County Elections Office, raising the issue to a supervisor to make doubly sure that her ballot had counted. But for the average person, she said, encountering a voter challenge could pose an insurmountable barrier. Had she less time or knowledge about the complex web of election infrastructure, she said, “that might be an issue that prevented me from voting, and it also might be something that would deter me from bothering in the fall.”

Citizen voter challenges, once an obscure practice, have transformed into a mass movement in Georgia, with conservative activists challenging hundreds of thousands of voter registrations in the last several years. Often, the waves of voter challenges coincide with competitive, high-profile elections, with election conspiracy theorists using complaints of rampant voter fraud to cast doubt on election results. Voters of color — and Black voters in particular — have been disproportionately impacted by these vast disenfranchisement campaigns.

And voting rights experts say a newly-passed election law, known as SB 189 , is likely to make the problem worse.

The evolution of voter challenge laws

Challenging a voter’s registration is nothing new. Almost every state in the country has laws allowing residents to notify local election boards if a resident is found to be voting improperly. In Georgia, citizen campaigns to challenge election registration date back to the 1940s , when white supremacists mobilized to prevent Black voters from accessing the polls. In modern times, however, these laws had not posed any widespread barriers to voters until recently.

“Voter challenge laws were originally intended for a bit of a different era,” said Andrew Garber, a lawyer at the Brennan Center for Justice who has been tracking mass voter challenges since 2021. “It was a way for one person to be able to say, ‘I have personal knowledge that someone is presenting to vote who is no longer eligible.’”

But in recent years, state legislators have passed sweeping election law changes, giving election conspiracy theorists greater power to challenge their fellow voters. SB 202 , a 2021 election bill, codified the ability for any one person to challenge an unlimited number of voter registrations. Voting rights organizations have largely considered mass challenges to be voter intimidation tactic.

“It can be scary as a voter to learn that your name is on some list claiming you're not eligible to vote,” Garber said, adding that being challenged can "make it more likely that people will ultimately not be able to vote or choose not to vote.”

In the years since SB 202 took effect, a few conservative activists have filed sweeping challenges, accusing hundreds of thousands of Georgia residents of being improperly registered to vote. The emergence of technology like EagleAI allows activists to comb through massive datasets like the National Change of Address Database, identifying people whose registration may contain errors and submitting those discrepancies to local election officials as evidence of malfeasance.

More: A Georgia man created a tool to challenge voter registrations. Trump's allies may use it.

“The people being challenged are people who have been accepted onto the rolls as registered voters,” said Andrea Young, the executive director of the ACLU of Georgia, which has vowed to sue Gov. Brian Kemp over SB 189. “These are not people who are ineligible to vote.”

Oftentimes, she added, administrative errors interfere with a voter’s ability to cast a ballot. If the county fails to include a resident’s apartment number in their voter registration, for instance, they may be targeted by activists who accuse the resident of having duplicate voter registrations.

“This whole idea of challenges takes what may have been a government mistake and puts the burden back on the citizen who has done their duty and registered to vote,” Young said.

Though only a small number of people are routinely filing voter challenges, the open-ended nature of voter challenge laws has allowed these activists to cast a wide net. A 2023 ProPublica investigation found that nearly 90% of voter challenges filed since the passage of SB 202 — encompassing 89,000 voters — were submitted by just six people.

The genesis of SB 189

While SB 202 can be credited with expanding protections for those filing mass voter challenges, SB 189 has served as a critical counterpart, morphing Georgia’s mass challenge landscape even further.

More: ‘A step back for voters’ rights’: Civil, voting rights groups react to Georgia election law SB 189

During the 2024 legislative session, members of the Georgia General Assembly were beginning to realize that the large volume of voter challenges were taking their toll on local election boards, who were the recipients of voter challenges.

Many local election officials had no previous experience dealing with voter challenges before receiving hundreds or even thousands at once, and were not given any additional aid to help accommodate the deluge. The mass voter challenge clause in SB 189 was created to implement a procedure for local election officials to follow.

“There seems to be some inconsistencies with how challenges are sustained or denied, and we want to codify the fact that there are only a very limited number of reasons to sustain a challenge,” said state Sen. Max Burns, who authored both SB 202 and SB 189, at a March committee meeting where the voter challenge language was workshopped.

The resulting legislation, however, did the exact opposite. It listed some criteria that election board members may consider when receiving a challenge, such as knowledge that a voter had passed away. But it also failed to place any restrictions on what evidence activists may submit when questioning fellow voters, how many challenges one person can submit at once, or even mandate that they be residents of the state.

Additionally, while federal law prohibits states from systematically removing voters from the rolls within 90 days of an election, voter registrations can be canceled on a case-by-case basis within that window. SB 189 authorizes county election boards to continue removing voters until 45 days before an election. All these factors create chaos for local election boards.

“Challenges, even when they don't succeed, have a lot of downstream effects,” Garber said. “Certainly voter intimidation, voter confusion, are among those effects, as is wasting a ton of election officials’ time.”

The new face of voter suppression

The technology that election conspiracy theorists are using is undoubtedly modern; Election conspiracy theorists are launching networks of grassroots activists using apps and software platforms to challenge voter registrations, holding cross-country trainings by Zoom . But civil rights groups say the tactics these groups have been employing are just new facets of an ongoing effort to curb minority voter access.

More: Voter ID and absentee-ballot limits: the South tightens key voting laws ahead of election

“Conservatives have pushed election fraud conspiracy theory for decades in order to call into question their electoral losses,” said Brendan Fischer, deputy executive director of the watchdog organization Documented, which has been tracking the rise in mass voter challenges.

“There's sort of a baked in suspicion of communities that election deniers think are more predisposed towards fraud,” added Emma Steiner, a researcher at Documented. “They're very suspicious of college campuses, college dorms. They're very suspicious of minority neighborhoods. They're very suspicious of things that are baked into election denialism, these conspiracy myths about who is going to commit voter fraud, who is going to attempt to subvert elections.”

For voters of color in particular, advocates say, being on the receiving end of a challenge can also bring up painful reminders of generations’ worth of violence and discrimination.

“You can imagine for people who have been voters since they were 18, they've been voting for 30, 40 years,” said Gerald Griggs, president of the Georgia NAACP. “For another citizen to challenge them — and whether or not they are legally entitled to vote — challenges their very citizenship. And for many African Americans, that harkens back to Jim Crow. It harkens back to slavery itself.”

Even when restrictive election laws do not target people of color explicitly, marginalized communities have historically borne the brunt of laws that make it harder to vote said Lauren Groh-Wargo, the CEO of the nonprofit voting rights group Fair Fight.

“You can look back and see how often there was race-neutral language around the practices and statutes at the time to 'clean’ the voter rolls, and then racially targeted efforts to remove Black folks,” Groh-Wargo said of historical voter suppression tactics.

Ultimately, Groh-Wargo hopes that the rise in mass voter challenges will serve as a mobilizing force for Georgia voters in the upcoming election year.

“They wouldn't be changing the rules every two years, they wouldn't be trying to erect barriers if your vote didn't matter,” she said. “Your vote matters.”

Maya Homan is a fellow at USA TODAY based in Atlanta, where she covers Georgia politics and elections. Follow her on X, formerly Twitter, as @MayaHoman.

This article originally appeared on Savannah Morning News: The changing face of voter suppression: How SB 189 cleared the way for mass challenges in Georgia