A judge in Georgia ruled on Monday that two of the states’ counties must stop cleaning their voter rolls of unverified or deceased voters.
Election officials in Ben Hill and Muscogee counties were removing disqualified voters from their registration lists ahead of the Senate run-off elections. But U.S. District Judge Leslie Abrams Gardner ordered the counties to stop.
Gardner, who also happens to be the sister of failed gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, claimed that election officials improperly relied on U.S. Postal Service change-of-address data to clean out registration lists.
This data is not verified, Gardner argued, despite the fact that local voter Ralph Russell provided evidence from publicly accessible voter-registration databases that proved thousands of voters had moved out of Georgia.
“I believe that each of the individuals named … as a result of registering their name and change of address to a location outside of Muscogee County, removed to another state with the intention of making the new state their residence,” Russell argued.
“Thus, each individual has lost their residence in Muscogee County, and consequently, each individual is ineligible to vote in Muscogee County,” he added.
The Muscogee Board of Elections filed a motion earlier this week demanding that Gardner recuse herself from the case because of her relationship with her sister, Abrams, who runs several leftist voter advocacy groups in the state.
Abrams is “a Georgia politician and voting rights activist who was the Democratic candidate in the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election and has since engaged in various highly publicized efforts to increase voter registration and turnout for the 2020 general election in Georgia,” according to the board.
Gardner responded to the recusal request and declined to step aside.
“The Court has reviewed the motion and finds no basis for recusal. An Order detailing the Court’s reasoning is forthcoming,” she wrote.
