A federal judge has blocked two counties in Georgia trying to remove more than 4,000 voters from electoral rolls ahead of the Senate runoffs on Jan. 5 that will determine which party controls the upper chamber, Axios reported on Tuesday.
Judge Leslie Abrams Gardner, who is the sister of former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, ruled that the attempts by Muscogee and Ben Hill counties would likely violate the National Voter Registration Act and deny citizens their constitutional right to vote.
She also said that the counties appeared to have imporperly invalidated registrations based on unverified change-of-address information, Politico reported.
Almost all the registrations that the counties attempted to rescind were in Muscogee County, which President-elect Joe Biden won easily in November. An additional 150 were from Ben Hill County, which Trump won by a wide margin.
The Muscogee County board had requested that the judge recuse herself from the case, because her sister filed a separate electoral lawsuit, Axios reported.
Lawyers for the board described Stacey Abrams as “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 Politco.
However, the judge said in her decision that the court "finds no basis for recusal."
Brian Freeman ✉
Brian Freeman, a Newsmax writer based in Israel, has more than three decades writing and editing about culture and politics for newspapers, online and television.
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