Channel 2 Action News has obtained an audit of the state’s voter rolls and found that the state’s election system is generally effective in preventing non-citizens from registering to vote.
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The audit found no evidence of widespread voter fraud and determined that no more than 0.1% of voter registration records contained issues related to identity verification, addresses or citizenship status.
Auditors reviewed roughly 7.9 million voter registrations and found about 2,570 potential non-citizens had, at some point, been placed in active or inactive voter status because of administrative failures. According to the audit, 407 of those registrations had a voting history.
Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said his office continues working to remove ineligible registrations when they are identified.
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“Obviously we’d like it to be zero, but that’s what we continue to work on,” Raffensperger told Channel 2’s Justin Gray.
He emphasized that people identified as non-citizens are removed from the voter rolls.
“I want voters to understand, if we catch non-citizens on the voter list, they’re immediately removed,” Raffensperger said.
The audit attributed most of the problems to human error, particularly within Georgia’s Department of Driver Services and the state’s automatic voter registration system. Auditors found workers sometimes misclassified immigration documents as proof of citizenship, improperly coded non-citizens as U.S. citizens, or processed voter registration applications before citizenship status had been fully verified.
The report cites examples where employment authorization cards were mistakenly entered as U.S. birth certificates.
Republican State Sen. Max Burns, who served on the committee that requested the audit, said his primary concern was understanding how those registrations occurred.
“I would say the question is not the 407. The question is, how did they get on the voter roll? OK, and that’s what we want to look at,” Burns said.
Burns says the report answers many of the questions he has had for years.
“Overall the report’s encouraging, very encouraging,” he said.
“Now we have hard data that we can go to constituents and say this is where we are. This is what we found,” Burns continued.
In addition to citizenship-related issues, auditors identified other registration concerns. The report found approximately 2,700 voter registrations listing post office boxes as residential addresses and 863 voter registrations that listed a Georgia Department of Corrections prison or transitional center address.
While auditors recommended improvements, they concluded that Georgia’s election system generally complies with legal requirements and aligns with best practices for maintaining accurate voter rolls.
The Department of Driver Services said it has already taken action in response to the audit’s findings.
“We take these findings seriously and have already implemented additional internal safeguards to further enhance our document review procedures,” DDS said in a statement.
The agency said it reviewed its entire database, rather than only the records identified by auditors, restricted credentials when documentation requirements were not met, shared relevant information with the Secretary of State’s Office and strengthened internal controls.
DDS also said in a statement to Gray that customers without complete records were “required to return to DDS and provide the missing documents. Those that we did not hear from were cancelled.”
The agency said it also “strengthened controls surrounding transactions involving birth certificates” and utilized a third-party verification system.
Overall, the audit concluded that errors identified in the voter registration system represent a very small fraction of Georgia’s nearly 8 million voter records and do not indicate widespread fraud.
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