Nearly 95% of Georgians are registered to vote, according to recently released federal election data.
The disclosure undermined Democrats’ claim that Georgia Republicans were suppressing voting rights in the state.
At the time of the 2020 election, there were roughly 7.2 million people registered to vote in Georgia, which leaves only about 387,000 people in the state’s eligible voting population unregistered, according to the Election Assistance Commission.
This total is a significant jump from 2016, when only 76% of eligible voters in the state were registered.
Only eight states had higher registration rates than Georgia, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Left-wing activists attributed the registration surge to failed gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams and her voter-registration efforts.
However, just a few months ago, Democrats were claiming Georgia and its Republican leaders were trying to repress the vote. Abrams went so far as to accuse state Republicans of passing “post-Reconstruction Jim Crow era laws.”
Her voting rights group, Fair Fight Action, also claimed an election integrity bill passed by state Republicans was “one of the strictest and most anti-democratic pieces of voter suppression in the country,” saying it threatened to “send voting rights in Georgia back to the days of Jim Crow.”
Georgia Republicans defended the election integrity bill as a necessary step towards increasing voter confidence.
As part of their effort to make sure Georgia’s elections are secure, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger announced in June that the state would be removing more than 100,000 “outdated” names from the state’s voter registration rolls to “make sure Georgia’s voter rolls are up to date.”
Raffensperger also said his office removed 18,486 voter files of dead people based on information obtained from Georgia’s Office of Vital Records and the Electronic Registration Information Center.
